Academic Articles

Eighteen months ago, Wycliffe College introduced into its M.Div program a so-called “pioneer stream.” The advertising cited the writings of missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, and his call to the church in the West to rise to the challenge of a post-Christendom world, and then concluded:

The kind of leadership that was required for established, healthy churches in a Christendom setting is radically different from what is needed in a post-Christian, postmodern setting where churches may not even exist. The church now needs not only visionary, mission-minded pastors, but also pioneers, entrepreneurs, and missionaries who can take the Gospel to cultures and subcultures in North America where Christ is not represented, and found new Christian communities.

So far, some fifteen students have been involved in the stream to a greater or lesser extent.

I want to address two questions today. Firstly, a theoretical or theological question: What exactly is a pioneer, and how do pioneers relate to our understanding of church? Is it a concept with any theological traction? And then the second question: what does a pioneer look like in practice? The first part is a kind of preliminary apologia for the idea of pioneering ministry, and the latter a case study.

How does the idea of pioneering ministry relate to our understanding of church?

Many of you will be aware of the 2004 Church of England report to General Synod called Mission Shaped Church, which was unanimously adopted, and which has shaped developments in the Church of England ever since in quite radical ways. One of the innovative recommendations of the report was:

The Ministry Division of the Archbishops’ Council should actively seek to encourage the identification, selection and training of pioneer church planters, for both lay and ordained ministries. . . . Patterns of training should be appropriate to the skills, gifting and experience of those being trained.[1]

Several points are worth noting here: pioneering is equated with church planting, pioneering is an “equal opportunity” ministry for lay and ordained; and there should be specialized training for these pioneers.

So what is this about? Is this just another “flavor of the month” fad which wise leaders will ignore because it will disappear as quickly as it arrived? What I want to attempt is not a theology of pioneering, and not even a Bible study on pioneering: it is more an attempt to stake out a theological field, and say, I think this is the area in which we need to dig in order to figure this out.

So where to begin? We begin with God—of course!—and with the activity of God in the world we have learned to call the missio dei. Here is how Jurgen Moltmann explains the missio dei and the church:

Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa.[2]

So how do pioneer ministries relate to the missio dei? All ministry begins in the ministry of Jesus Christ and flows from the ministry of Jesus Christ, and pioneering is no exception. Let’s begin with scripture. The term pioneer occurs in the NT several times: the Greek word is archegos, which is variously translated originator, author, founder and pioneer[3] and is always applied to Jesus Christ: “God exalted [Jesus] at his right hand as Leader and Savior” (Acts 5:30-31); “you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 3:14-15); “It was fitting that God . . . in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10); and (perhaps the best-known):

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . . let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

There is another related word, however, which is applied to Jesus and to his followers, and that is the term “apostle.” Jesus is only called an “apostle” once (in Hebrews),[4] but in the Gospel of John the idea of being sent (which is the meaning of the Greek word apostello) is central: Jesus is described as being sent by the Father no less than forty times.[5] Then, at the end of the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you” (John 20:21): for John, this is the point at which the disciples become “the apostles,” sent by Jesus as he was sent by the Father.

The question has dogged Christian history, however, whether the twelve are the only ones legitimately called “apostles.” Most agree that the twelve have a unique role as apostles: as John Stott puts it, they were “a very small and distinctive group . . . personally chosen and authorized by Jesus, and had to be eyewitnesses of the risen Lord.” He adds, “in this sense there are no apostles today.”[6]

But there are other senses. For example, Stott also says, “The verb apostello means to ‘send,’ and all Christian people are sent into the world as Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses, to share in the apostolic mission of the whole church.”[7] In between these two meanings (the twelve and all Christians) is a third sense. Michael Griffiths cites New Testament scholar John Goldingay as pointing out that the word ‘apostle’ is ‘etymologically equivalent to missionary,’ and that ‘apostles are perhaps the pioneer missionary evangelists through whom Christian communities are founded.’ Griffiths adds, “It does not seem biblically necessary to deny the continuing existence of apostles in this secondary sense of pioneer church-planting missionaries.”[8] It is interesting to note that in both Catholic and Protestant tradition, this is the way the term is popularly used: St Francis Xavier, “apostle of the Indies and Japan,” William Carey, “apostle to India,” and so on.[9]

The term “apostle” in this sense was little used during the centuries of Christendom, and it was not a ministry that was recovered by the mainline Protestant Reformers. Indeed, most scholars agree that the Reformation lacked any significant missionary impulse. [10] Unfortunately, missiology is not just an optional extra, like heated seats in your car. Ignoring mission is more like leaving the chili powder out of your chili recipe: everything is affected and the chili is just not the same thing.

So, for example, the Reformation’s understanding of ministry is different because of the absence of missiology. Case in point: the Reformers do not consider the possibility of apostles as “pioneer missionary evangelists.” Lutheran theologians, for example, believed that the Great Commission of Matthew 28 had been fulfilled by the Twelve, and was no longer the church’s responsibility. Calvin similarly sees apostolic ministry as having come to an end. In his commentary on Ephesians 4, he writes:

[O]f the offices which Paul enumerates [apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher], only the last two [pastor and teacher] are perpetual. For God adorned His Church with apostles, evangelists and prophets, only for a time . . . But without pastors and [teachers] there can be no government of the church.[11]

For him, the main issue is whether pastor and teacher constitute one gift or two.

Newbigin summarizes the effects of this lack of missiology like this:

[T]he period in which our thinking about the Church received its main features [that is, the Protestant Reformation] was the period in which Christianity had practically ceased to be a missionary religion. . . . It was in this period, when the dimension of the ends of the earth had ceased to exist as a practical reality in the minds of [Protestant] Christians, that the main patterns of churchmanship were formed. The congregation was not a staging post for world mission but a gathering place for the faithful of a town or village. The ministry was not understood in terms of mission but in terms of guardianship of those already in the fold.[12]

As a result, whatever the reasons for this blind spot[13], it remains the fact that Reformation ecclesiology does not help us much with thinking about mission or apostolic ministries or pioneer church planting.

However, among those who have picked up Newbigin’s challenge to the church has been a group calling itself the Gospel and Our Culture Network.[14] Their most significant contribution to the conversation is a book called Missional Church (1998). In one chapter, the authors tackle this specific issue of the need for a renewal of apostolic ministries as crucial to rediscovering our missional calling:

Pastoral gifts are important, but in the current setting of the North American church, the apostolic gifts need to be called forth and equipped. While Ephesians 4 outlines a series of leadership gifts [apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher], the contemporary church focuses most of its energy on identifying, training and credentialing that limited section of those gifts related to the pastor-teacher. This indicates the levels at which the model of the settled parish culture continues to prevail. In the marginalized, missional setting that lies ahead for the church in North America, this pastor-teacher model is insufficient.[15]

All this is what lies behind the decision of the Wycliffe College, following the lead of the Church of England and its theological colleges, to introduce the pioneer stream to the M.Div program, not instead of training leaders for existing congregations, but alongside them. I am happy that we are not trying to introduce the term “apostolic,” because it would sound pretentious and presumptuous, even elitist. But if we understand apostles in this sense to be “pioneer missionary evangelists through whom Christian communities are founded,”[16] then technically it is what we are seeking to do.

That’s the first question. But then we ask what exactly is this unfamiliar animal called the pioneer minister? The second part of this paper addresses this question:

2. What does a pioneer look like?

Here I want to draw on my work on Vincent Donovan, and particularly his letters. Donovan lived from 1926 till 2000. For sixteen years, from 1957 till 1973, he was a Roman Catholic missionary in Northern Tanzania, and for two of those years (1966-1968) worked among the Maasai. He belonged to a missionary order, the Order of the Holy Ghost, begun in the 19th century and more commonly these days called the Spiritans. In 1973, he returned to the US, and in 1978 wrote a book about his experiences called Christianity Rediscovered (Orbis Books, 1978, 2003), which has become something of a classic in missiology, cited in works as diverse as Adrian Hastings’ A History of African Christianity, 1950-1975 (1979), George Sumner’s The First and the Last (2004), Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder’s Constants in Context (2004), the Church of England’s Mission-Shaped Church report (2004), Brian McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy (2004), and Dorothy Hodgson’s The Church of Women (2005).

Let me suggest six characteristics I see in Donovan which I think may be fairly said to be typical of those with this apostolic charism of pioneering.

(1) Pioneers are restless at knowing that people have not heard the Gospel

I suspect this is the basic motivation for pioneers. You see it clearly in the Apostle Paul:

I make it my ambition to proclaim the good news, not where Christ has already been named, so that I do not build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him shall see, and those who have never heard of him shall understand.” (Romans 15:20-21)

Most Christians who see themselves as communicators of the Gospel spend their time preaching to those who have already heard the name of Christ, and are content to do so. Paul is different: so is Donovan. In June 1960, he writes:

I personally am responsible for preaching the gospel to seventy-thousand Arusha tribesmen, and further up the line, together with another priest, I am responsible for doing the same to fifty-thousand Meru tribesmen. That’s 120,000 people on the conscience of Reverend Vincent J. Donovan of Winston Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. . . . Perhaps you understand that it is not easy to get on a personal first-name relationship with all of my parishioners, especially since some of their names are so difficult, that it develops an extra muscle in your tongue if you pronounce them often. (June 1960)

Notice how he starts: “I personally am responsible for preaching the gospel.” There is already a Catholic church among the Meru with thirty-one members, and some would be satisfied to minister to them—but not a pioneer. Here is one of his clearest statements of why:

For a big group of people in our own diocese [the Meru] whose tribal ground covered an unbelievably large land area, the gospel was an unknown quantity. They had never heard it. . . . How I longed to go to them! (April 1963, emphasis original)

Donovan, like the Apostle Paul, is a pioneer in the sense that he has a deep yearning to go to those who have never heard the gospel. This is the deepest desire of his heart.

This is why, as he looks at the church’s deployment of its resources around the world, it grieves him that:

out of the forty-thousand missionaries of the world . . . less than one thousand of them [are] assigned to evangelize the four-fifths of the world that is pagan. . . . scarcely eighteen percent of the world . . . has heard of Christ, nearly two thousand years after the Resurrection. (July 1970)

As a result, the conviction grew on him during his early years in Tanzania that, for him at least, other ministries had to be secondary. Early on, he is proud of the fact that missionaries need to be generalists. He (and the great majority were men) needs to be “pastor, principal of school, architect, mason, carpenter, painter, plumber, mechanic, judge, doctor, cook, employer, administrator, accountant, diplomat, explorer, lawyer, beggar, [and] priest” (August 1959). But by 1965, he is bemoaning the fact that “many of the priests and other missionaries who were working in East Africa were doing everything but teaching religion. And you know, that is actually why they came to Africa—to teach religion—or ‘to preach the Gospel,’ as it says in the Bible.” (April 1965) In December of that year, he writes, “I have been involved in many kinds of work out here, building, transporting, medical, social, educational, and searching out new sections where the church has never entered.” Then he adds a very revealing note: “but it was in catechetical work that I truly felt I was closest to the heart of the matter.” It’s the work of evangelizing those who have never heard the Gospel that engages him most fully.

This impulse leads to a second characteristic of pioneers:

(2) Pioneers are more centrifugal in their ministry than centripetal

Here’s how he summarized one stage of his work:

Most of my time is not spent around the little mission church, but outside the mission. Most of my work is not with the Christians, but with Pagans and [Muslims]. It is an entirely different atmosphere, and calls for entirely different methods. (June 1960)

Later on, thanks to the influence of Anglican missiologist Roland Allen, he begins to understand the Apostle Paul’s method of missionary work, and contrasts it with what other missionaries have been doing for decades, and you will notice his use of the terms centrifugal and centripetal:

Paul . . . neither built nor established a mission [meaning a “mission compound”]. He himself was the mission, he and his companions, a mobile mission, a temporary mission in any one place, a team in motion or movement towards the establishment, not of a mission, but of an indigenous church. Paul founded churches. We found missions. . . . In the latter case, it is no longer a centrifugal force reaching out forever as far as it can. It becomes instead centripetal, attracting everything to itself. Instead of symbolizing movement towards another thing (in this case, church [that is, a new congregation]), it becomes instead, itself, the end of the line. . . . The word missionary is really a misnomer in this context. The command to go out and preach the gospel has become subtly transformed into “Stay here; take care of what you have. Let others come to you.” Missionary movement comes to a dead stop. (July 1970)

Of course, as soon as you decide to “go” and get involved with “the other,” questions arise. We know how to relate to those who are similar to ourselves. Derek Warlock, former Bishop of Liverpool, once defined culture as “the way we do things round here.” When we meet “the other,” we find they “do things” differently, all the way from a different language to a different understanding of God, and we are faced with the question of how to communicate the Gospel in this different culture. As a result, pioneers by the very nature of their calling are faced immediately and urgently with what we call for short “Gospel and culture” questions—rather more than those of us for whom church is our normal environment.

It is clear that the Apostle Paul wrestled with this question:

Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! . . . [T]hough I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. . . . To those outside the law I became as one outside the law . . . so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, [why?] that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. (1 Corinthians 9:16-23)

This leads me to suggest another characteristic of pioneers:

(3) Pioneers seek to sit light to their own culture

I don’t know if Donovan ever encountered the writings of twentieth century Sri Lankan missiologist D. T. Niles (1908-1970), but he would certainly have sympathized with Niles’ advice:

When the missionaries came to our lands they brought not only the seed of the gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flowerpot included. So . . . what we have to do is break the flowerpot, take out the seed of the gospel, sow it in our own cultural soil, and let our own version of Christianity grow.[17]

Donovan’s Order was sensitive to this issue from the beginning. Their founder, Francis Libermann (1802–1852), had advised them, for example:

Put off Europe, its customs, its spirit. . . . Become Negroes to the Negroes, in order to form them as they should be, not in the fashion of Europe, but allow them to keep what is peculiar to them.[18]

Having said that, however, Donovan and some of his colleagues were dissatisfied with the way the Order was living out its charism in the late 1950’s. In an early letter, Donovan notes, without comment:

Several [Spiritan missionaries] have built their own houses; one of which could have come out of the pages of “Better Homes and Gardens” at half the professional price. One of them . . . without any training whatsoever, designed himself a beautiful, magnificent Gothic Cathedral—and has almost completed it.[19] (August 1 1959)

A Western flowerpot was governing the shape of the African plant. Some of the dissatisfaction had to do with the Diocese of Moshi, where Donovan was first placed. Although it was under African leadership by this time[20], the church there had taken on a particularly European coloring, at least in Donovan’s eyes. They were, he reports, “Western in education, western in dress, western in the Christian names they bear, the churches they worship in, and the hymns they sing” (October 1967). Libermann had explicitly warned against imitating “the fashion of Europe,” so no wonder Donovan and his colleagues were dissatisfied. However, in 1963, a new diocese, the Diocese of Arusha, was carved out of the growing Diocese of Moshi, a Spiritan bishop (Dennis Durning) was appointed, and most of the Spiritan missionaries were transferred there. This gave them scope to put into practice their convictions about enculturation.

By 1965, Donovan has begun to use the phrase “naked Christianity”—that is, Christianity without any cultural trappings. He comes close to Niles’ analogy by saying, “I had to plant the seed in the Masai[21] culture, and let it grow wild.”[22] He says the goal of the Spiritans is:

to examine our religion itself, strip it of all the accidentals that have accrued to it throughout the years and centuries; see if we could get back to a kind of naked Christianity. People have a tendency to cling to accidentals and forget essentials. We wouldn’t give our people a chance to cling to accidentals, because we wouldn’t teach any. (June 1965)

Most these days, I think, would agree with David Bosch, who says, “There never was a ‘pure’ message, supracultural and suprahistorical. It [is] impossible to penetrate to a residue of Christian faith that was not, in a sense, already interpretation.”[23] Newbigin suggests that to try and separate what is cultural in our understanding of the faith from what is “authentic” is “like pretending to move a bus while you are sitting on it.”[24] It cannot be done. The closest we can come, he suggests, is through studying scripture with people of other cultures and learning to respect their perspectives and thus question our own—as might happen, for example, at an international conference.

In Christianity Rediscovered, Donovan actually describes how this happened for him: for example, in his work among the Maasai, he assumed that candidates for baptism would be examined and baptized one by one—whereas the Maasai assumed that whole villages would be baptised together as communities. Donovan could have insisted that his way was the right way, but was sensitive enough to realise the Maasai were right and he was wrong: whole villages were baptised.[25]

Even though it is impossible to distinguish “naked Christianity,” yet the awareness that all of us have cultural biases in interpreting the Gospel, and the willingness to accept correction from someone of another culture, is crucial for our spiritual health—and especially for those who are pioneers.

Fourthly, if pioneers want to take the Gospel to those who have never heard it, and are sensitized to cultural differences, then a major characteristic will be that:

(4) Pioneers have a desire to translate the Gospel

Not long after he arrived in Tanzania, Donovan was struck by the fact that many of the hymns the African Catholics sang were Swahili words set to “Alsatian, French and German” tunes. The most Westernized of the tribes, the Chagga, seemed to be satisfied with this, but the Maasai were not: he writes, “They do not like Swahili . . . And they do not understand or like European melodies.” So Donovan began to collect Maasai tunes, and set the words of the Mass (Latin, of course!) to those tunes. The result was dramatic:

After the Mass, the Masai . . . in the blankets and skins came to me with tears in their eyes, to thank me for bringing to them, in a way they understood, the message of God and the worship of God.

The mark of a pioneer is not just that he or she does this, but that they find joy in doing it: “Would you think me strange if I told you that that day there were tears in my eyes, too—if I told you that there is nothing—nothing quite like missionary work?” (Aug 9, 1960) Not surprisingly, he adds, “I became half Masai myself” (July 1960).

It’s an interesting historical footnote that around this time he asked his bishop for permission to do the whole of the high mass in the Maasai language. The bishop, a Chagga by the name of Kilasara, had no choice but to say no but, Donovan comments, “I was told such permission will be granted at the Ecumenical Council soon to be held.” (August 9 1960) That “Ecumenical Council” was what came to be known as the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), at which the Spiritans and their concerns were well represented.

This passion for translation is actually one way that a pioneer safeguards against imposing his or her own culture. Lamin Sanneh is an African teaching at Yale, who has written extensively on the effect of translation. He puts it this way:

[T]he gospel is potentially capable of transcending the cultural inhibitions of the translator and taking root in fresh soil [the seed image again!], a piece of transplanting that will in time come to challenge the presuppositions of the translator [—precisely what happened with Donovan’s revolution about communal baptisms] . . . When one translates, it is like pulling the trigger of a loaded gun: the translator cannot recall the speeding bullet.[26]

Perhaps it is obvious by now, but the fifth characteristic is worth spelling out:

(5) Pioneers are willing to take on a challenge

The desire to share the Gospel with those who have never heard it means that pioneers are prepared to make sacrifices. On two occasions, Donovan’s bishop asked him to take on a pioneering challenge. The first was in 1961, when Bishop Kilasara sent a message asking Donovan to leave the Senior Seminary in Kibosho, which he had been directing, and to go to Usa River to begin a mission among the Meru tribe. Donovan writes:

The Meru! They stretched out from the south east corner ofMountMerudown into the plains far below. I remembered hearing back in 1958 that in the whole Meru tribe, there were only eleven Catholics. I asked the vicar general if he knew how many Catholics there were in the tribe now. He said according to the latest statistics there were now thirty-one. Thirty-one Catholics in a tribe of fifty-thousand! They were one of the most stubborn tribes we had ever come in contact with, rejecting every advance we ever made towards them. The vicar general was smiling. (April 1963)

Most of us would not be excited at such a challenge. Donovan is different. His immediate response? “Mission to the Meru! Mission to the Meru! My heart began to sing” (April 1963).

For a pioneer like Donovan, the challenge of a pioneering assignment like this is precisely what gives him joy.

Five years later, his bishop (now the Spiritan Bishop Durning) wanted him to apply the missionary strategy that he had developed among the Maasai to another tribe, the Sonjo, and again Donovan rose to the challenge:

The Sonjo! The Sonjo are a tribe more primitive than the Masai, mysterious in their origins . . . almost completely impervious to any outside influence. . . . Because of [this], they can be an extremely difficult people with which to work. . . . Of course, this is what I had been dreaming of, what I had been saying we not only can do but must do—evangelize one tribe after the other, and move on, never settling down, never letting the word mission be changed from the active, moving, dynamic thing that it is supposed to be into a static, settled down, comfortable, turned-in, institutional, end-of-the-line type thing that it usually becomes. . . . I took the job—and a stiff drink the bishop offered me. (September 1968)

In light of the first five characteristics, I do not think the final one will come as a surprise:

(6) Pioneers are often considered trouble-makers

Donovan himself does not seem to have been labeled this way, but this is because he was a part of a missionary Order. But the Order itself was often considered a thorn in the flesh by the national church of Tanzania. When the new Diocese of Arusha was created in 1963, for some it was seen as a way to accommodate (and perhaps isolate) the ethos of the Spiritans, who were regarded as uncomfortably radical. Donovan comments on what happened at national church gatherings:

We in Arusha . . . are pretty far out on a limb in many things. . . . Opinions and thoughts from Arusha always caused much commotion, and were inevitably received with much suspicion and fear.

One thorny issue concerned the possibility of ordaining married men. As Donovan worked among the Maasai, he was very struck by how natural leaders emerge from the community—and he would like to have ordained them.[27] But, of course, in the Catholic system, they would first of all had to do seven years theological training, and be committed to celibacy. Even if the churches could wait that long, by the time they came back, how far would they be able to relate to their own people? Donovan describes arguing the case at a national conference:

[T]he hostility from the local clergy of other Dioceses and from Bishops towards the idea of married priests was incredible, we almost thought insurmountable. After a year of meetings, discussions etc., the change in mentality is just as remarkable. I think everyone agrees that something must be done and although everyone is not yet prepared to go as far as we want to go, they are at least willing at last to discuss the problem. (Dec 30, 1969)

Usually it is an individual pioneer who is a thorn in the flesh for the institutional church. What is amusing here is that it is a whole pioneering diocese (not to mention its bishop) that creates a problem for the national church. One correspondent told me that other Tanzanian bishops tried for twenty years to get Durning to resign: in fact, he lasted 23 years!

Conclusion

You will not be surprised to know that I think we need to do more to nurture pioneers and pioneer ministries. Strangely enough, the two Christian traditions that have taken this kind of ministry seriously are the so-called evangelical denominations on the one hand, and the Roman Catholics on the other. It seems to have been harder for Protestant mainline denominations—Anglican, United and Lutheran, for example—to read the signs of the times and act accordingly. Maybe we had more invested in Christendom than either of the other groups, and are still in denial about its death!

If I am right, then there are three fronts we need to work on: firstly, developing a fuller theology of pioneer ministries and an understanding of how it relates to our missiology and our ecclesiology; secondly, looking for models—starting with the Apostle Paul, but including those like Vincent Donovan, who have exercised the charism of pioneering ministry over the centuries and who have much to teach us; and thirdly, we need to work on finding ways to identify, cultivate and deploy those who have the potential for this kind of ministry.

But let me give the last word to Vincent Donovan:

An inward-turned Christianity is a dangerous counterfeit, an alluring masquerade—is no Christianity at all. . . . Christianity must be a force that moves outwards. A Christian, in his community or out of it, must, like Christ, be essentially a “man for others.”[28] Not for himself. And the Christian community is basically in existence for others. That is the whole meaning of a Christian community. . . . Christ did not say, “Be good and the world will come to you.” He said, “Go out to all the world.” (May 1970)

Let us be imitators of Vincent Donovan as he was of the Apostle Paul, as he was of Christ. To the glory of God.

Lecture given on the occasion of John Bowen’s promotion to ful professor

[2] Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1977), 64.

[3] This section builds on the work of George Lings, “Looking in the mirror: what makes a pioneer?” in Dave Male (ed.) Pioneers 4 Life: Explorations in theology and wisdom for pioneering leaders (Abingdon, UK: Bible Reading Fellowship 2011)

[4] “Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession” (Hebrews 3:1).

[5] For more on this theme in John’s Gospel, see chapter 4 of my Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People: Good News for those Looking for a Fresh Approach (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2002).

[9] By the same token, Ignatius Loyola is never called an apostle, even though he founded the Jesuit missionary movement, simply because he himself lived most of his life in Rome, and did not pioneer any church planting.

[10] Missiologist David Bosch says: “[V]ery little happened by way of a missionary outreach during the first two centuries after the Reformation. . . . [M]ost theologians of Lutheran orthodoxy [for instance] . . . believed that the ‘Great Commission’ had been fulfilled by the apostles [read: the Twelve] and was no longer binding on the church.” David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York: Orbis 1991), 243-248. He says that, following the Reformation, “The church is a place where something is done, not a living organism doing something.” (249) Bishop Stephen Neil agrees: “In the Protestant world, during the period of the Reformation, there was little time for thought of missions.” Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1964), 220. And historian Diarmaid MacCulloch: “Reformation Protestants did very little missionary work outside the boundaries of Europe; during the sixteenth century they were still too busy fighting for their existence against Catholics, and also fighting among themselves to establish their identify.” Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Toronto: Viking 2003), 414.

[12] “Theology was not concerned so much to state the Gospel in terms of non-Christian cultures, as with the mutual struggle of rival interpretations of the Gospel. Church history was taught not as the story of missionary advance in successive encounters of the Gospel with different forms of human culture and society but rather as the story of doctrinal and other conflicts within the church.” Lesslie Newbigin, Honest Religion for Secular Man (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1966), 102-103. See also Moltmann 1977, 7. Luther’s six point summary of the functions of the church says nothing about mission.

[13] A characteristically Anabaptist hermeneutic is offered by Stuart Murray: “Europe was still regarded as essentially Christian, in need of doctrinally sound preaching and effective pastoral care, rather than evangelizing.” Church Planting: Laying Foundations (Waterloo ON: Herald Press 2001), 95. David Bosch goes into more detail, but comes to essentially the same conclusion, in Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York: Orbis 1991), 243-248. He says that, following the Reformation, “The church is a place where something is done, not a living organism doing something.” (249)

Evangelism has been a preoccupation in many mainline denominations over the past twenty years or so. On one level, this may simply have been a panic reaction to declining numbers and the feeling that evangelism is one way to “get people back to church. My own church, the Anglican Church, was not untypical in proclaiming the 1990s a Decade of Evangelism.

On a more substantial level, the renewed interest is a reflection of the gradual reinstatement of evangelism as a legitimate aspect of the mission dei over the past fifty years. David Bosch in his magisterial Transforming Mission has traced the development of this new understanding of mission, attributing it to changes both on the ecumenical side and on the evangelical side:

[A]n important segment of evangelicalism appears poised to . . . embody anew a full-orbed gospel of the irrupting reign of God not only in individual lives but also in society. A similar turning of the tide, but in the opposite direction, has been in evidence in ecumenical circles since the middle of the 1970s.

On the one side, evangelicals have softened their suspicion of the “social Gospel”, so that an evangelical leader such as John Stott, interacting with ecumenical concerns about evangelism, could write as long ago as 1975 that:

“Mission” describes . . . everything that the church is sent into the world to do. “Mission” embraces the church’s double vocation of service to be “the salt of the earth’”[social concern] and “the light of the world” [evangelism].

This has served to reduce the caricature of evangelism which frequently exists in mainline churches that evangelism is necessarily an insensitive, hypocritical verbal exercise.

On the other side, a writer like Lesslie Newbigin, not an evangelical, but in a book published (significantly enough) jointly by Eerdmans and the World Council of Churches, has also written of the place of evangelism in the broad scope of the missio dei:

[T]he [New Testament] preaching is an explanation of the healings. . . . [T]he healings . . . do not explain themselves. They could be misinterpreted . . . The works by themselves did not convey the new fact. That has to be stated in plain words: “The kingdom of God has drawn near.

Thus there has been a remarkable move away from the polarization of a previous generation and a convergence of opinion that the missio dei embraces both word and action (Bosch says simply, “Words interpret deeds and deeds validate words” ) and that both are the responsibility of the church.

These two impulses “the one to seek new church members, and the other a theological convergence” have led in recent years to a flood of books on the subject of evangelism, with authors as surprising as Walter Brueggemann , and titles as startling as The Celtic Way of Evangelism. Many seek to define evangelism, and, while there are variations, most are summed up by John Stott’s simple definition: “Evangelism is to preach the Gospel.”

Of course, the idea of “preaching the Gospel” is hardly new. The use of the term “evangelism” itself may be a relatively recent innovation (the first recorded use of the term is in the writings of Francis Bacon in the 16th century), and the methodology of evangelism has since the nineteenth century often been modernist, but the impulse to evangelism is as old as Christianity itself.

This article will consider how Augustine in the Confessions describes his own experience of evangelism–or, rather, of being evangelized–and will then compare Augustine’s understanding of this experience with contemporary definitions of evangelism, and consider what the church today (not least the mainline church) can learn from this ancient example. I will consider the topic from three points-of-view: Augustine’s own (his theological interpretation of what happened to him), what I can only call a theocentric view (as Augustine understands God’s part in his conversion), and the church’s view (since the church is the locus of the work of evangelism, as of other aspects of the missio dei).

(a) Augustine’s point-of-view

Augustine’s story illustrates what has almost become a cliché in contemporary discourse about evangelism–that evangelism is a process – in the case of Augustine, a process that took over eleven years. Several factors were involved in the process, beginning with his turning away from childhood faith.

Augustine’s departure from Christian faith was similar to that of many people from a church background: a combination of growing up and experimenting with new things in life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, not finding adequate intellectual and spiritual nurture in his “faith of origin.” Thus, at the age of seventeen, he left home and went to Carthage. There, he says:

I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it . . . I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls. (3:1, 55)

In Carthage, he left “the safe path” and discovered the “pitfalls” of love and the theatre. To a casual observer, this might just look like a young man sowing his wild oats. With the benefit of hindsight, however, Augustine reads this period differently, arguing that what he was doing was far more serious than that: he was in fact doing what all sinful human beings tend to do: putting the creature in place of the Creator:

[M]y sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty and truth not in [God] but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error. (1:20, 40)

Because the essence of his leaving the faith was the desire to be his own God, the heart of the return will be a reversal of this, in other words, allowing God God’s rightful place in his life.

However far Augustine drifted from his childhood faith, a spiritual hunger was never far below the surface. When he said, “Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you” (1:1, 21), he spoke from personal experience. His first attempt to assuage that hunger was with the Manichees, which whom he experienced what Peter Brown calls “his first religious conversion.” Before long, however, he found he had doubts about the Manichees’ claims, and his spiritual hunger remained unsatisfied:

I gulped down this [the Manichees’] food because I thought that it was you. . . . And it did not nourish me, but starved me all the more. (3:6, 61)

He describes two blows in particular to his faith in Manicheism. Firstly, Firminus advised him to reject Manichean astrology as irrational:

In a kind and fatherly way he advised me to throw [the books of astrology] away and waste no further pains upon such rubbish, because there were other more valuable things to be done. (4:3, 74)

Then, secondly, at the age of 29, he met Faustus, reputed to be a great authority on Manicheism, whom he had hoped would answer all his questions, but Augustine was disappointed with Faustus’ superficiality, and said: “I began to lose hope that he could lift the veil and resolve the problems which perplexed me” (5:10, 104). In terms of the parable of the sower (perhaps the source of all understanding of evangelism as process), Augustine’s disillusionment with Manicheism broke up the ground in which the seed of the Gospel could be sown, or rather revived.

The next step in the process was that Augustine needed to hear the Gospel in a different form from that in which he had heard it in his youth. Under the influence of Ambrose’s preaching, Augustine “discovered how different Christian faith is from what he had supposed.” (Chadwick xx) (It is interesting that even today new converts, for example, through the Alpha program, will often speak of having discovered a Christianity that is quite different from what they had thought.) Some of this was the unlearning of his misconceptions about orthodox Christianity. For example:

I learned that your spiritual children . . . do not understand the words “God made man in his own image” to mean that you are limited by the shape of a human body. (6:3, 114)

Augustine describes this stage of learning what the church does not in fact teach thus:

Though I had not yet discovered that what the church taught was the truth, at least I had learned that she did not teach the doctrines which I so strongly denounced. (6:4, 115)

He also heard better explanation of scripture than he had encountered in Africa:

As for the passages which had previously struck me as absurd, now that I had heard reasonable explanations of many of them, I regarded them as of the nature of profound mysteries. (6:5, 117)

Thus the good seed of “the word” was sown into ground that had been well-prepared.

The turning point itself took place through the reading of a verse of scripture which he interpreted as exactly suited to his circumstances:

“Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature or nature’s appetites.” (Romans 13:13-14) (8:12, 178)

The verse describes two ways of living, one in self-indulgence, the other in relationship to Christ: he chose the latter. The movement from this point towards baptism is apparently straightforward and lacking in the kind of emotional angst that has accompanied his journey so far, and described with far more economy. Later, he will describe this series of events in terms of giving up his freedom and yielding control of his life to his Creator:

You know how great a change you have worked in me, for first of all you have cured me of the desire to assert my claim of liberty . . . [Y]ou have curbed my pride by teaching me to fear you and have tamed my neck to your yoke. (10:36, 244)

For Augustine, if the essence of sin is putting ourselves in the place of God, then the heart of conversion is acknowledging the rightful place of God in our lives. This is the substance of what happens to Augustine as the process of evangelism leads to his conversion.

Although Jesus’ parables of sowing and reaping suggest the idea of process in the life of faith, Augustine, perhaps surprisingly, does not use agricultural imagery, but prefers a different image for process, that of the journey. At various points in the Confessions, he interprets his life as “the road to conversion” (6:4, 115):

So, step by step, my thoughts moved on from the consideration of material things to the soul. (7:17, 151)

From time to time, the parable of the prodigal son is clearly in the background of this image. Twice Augustine casts himself in the role of prodigal:

The path that leads us away from you and brings us back again is not measured by footsteps or milestones. . . . [The prodigal’s] blindness was the measure of the distance he travelled away from you, so that he could not see your face. (1:18, 38)
Where were you in those days? How far away from me? I was wandering far from you and I was not even allowed to eat the husks on which I fed the swine. (3:6, 62)

He further understands that the Christian life itself (when he finally adopts it) will be a road on which the believer follows Jesus. For instance, when he goes to ask advice of Simplicianus, he wants to enquire “how best a man in my state of mind might walk upon your way.” (8:1, 157) Picking up Jesus’ own language of “the narrow way,” he adds:

[I]n my worldly life all was confusion. . . . I should have been glad to follow the right road, to follow our Saviour himself, but I could not make up my mind to venture along the narrow path. (8:1, 157)

So much for Augustine’s own mature reading of how the road led him by a circuitous route to Christian faith. The story looks somewhat different, however, when viewed from what Augustine understands to be:

2. A theocentric point-of-view

Augustine is deeply convinced that the work of drawing people into the Kingdom of God is the work of God. Evangelism is something only God can do. It is God who wants reconciliation with sinners, God who pursues them, God who draws them into relationship. Augustine’s convictions about the sovereignty of God mean that he understands God’s grace to precede any human activity: “My God, you had mercy on me before I had confessed to you” (3:7, 62) and knows from experience that “Man’s heart may be hard, but it cannot resist the touch of your hand.” (5:1, 91)

So how, from Augustine’s point-of-view, does God bring evangelism about? How does God bring people into the Kingdom? Augustine offers several clues in the Confessions.

One is that a sovereign God works through circumstances. As Augustine looks back, he sees God at work, even when he (Augustine) was not aware of it, to create situations that would move him towards faith. Thus, for instance, when Augustine moved from Carthage to Rome because he had heard that the students were quieter:

It was . . . by your guidance that I was persuaded to go to Rome. . . . [I]t was to save my soul that you obliged me to go and live elsewhere. . . . You applied the spur that would drive me away from Carthage and offered me enticements that would draw me to Rome . . . In secret you were using my own perversity . . . to set my feet upon the right course. (5:8, 100)

Augustine uses the metaphor of a ship helpless before the wind being steered by the helmsman to illustrate this sense of being moved irresistibly towards faith:

In my pride I was running adrift, at the mercy of every wind. You were guiding me as a helmsman steers a ship, but the course you steered was beyond my understanding. (4:14, 84)

Chadwick comments:

Decisions made with no element of Christian motive, without any questing for God or truth, brought him to where his Maker wanted him to be.

One aspect of this providential overseeing of circumstances is expressed in Augustine’s conviction that God allows difficulties in order to draw people like himself to faith. Thus Augustine found that his road of independence from God was not an easy road. At every turn, he found difficulty. On one level, Augustine sees this as simply the “natural” effect of moving away from God. He says: “[E]very soul that sins brings its own punishment upon itself.” (1:12, 33)

Yet he also attributes these difficulties to the direct hand of God, as a spur or goad to drive him back onto the right road. Even in his relationship to his concubine, which appears to have been a loving and generally satisfactory relationship, he observes that God “mixed much bitterness in that cup of pleasure.” (3:1, 55) We know that his mother prayed for him, and “Her prayers reached your presence, and yet you still left me to twist and turn in the dark.” (3:11, 68) Maybe the answer to her prayers was that he should twist and turn in the dark he had chosen—at least for a time. God’s love, in Augustine’s experience, is not soft!

It almost seems as though, the nearer he approaches to the truth, the more intense his suffering becomes. Although by the time he reaches Milan he begins to “prefer the Catholic teaching” (6:5, 116) and discovers the neo-Platonists, he is still miserable, finding he has less joy in life than a poor beggar. He attributes this too to the hand of God, seeking to turn him in the right direction, and, as so often, turns to the Psalms for a template through which to interpret his experience:

My soul was in a state of misery and you probed its wound to the quick, pricking it on to leave all else and turn to you to be healed. . . . [Y]ou broke my bones with the rod of your discipline. (6:6, 118)

Augustine observes also that he was moved towards faith through those who themselves do not have faith, and interprets this as a further sign of God’s sovereign power. Thus the influence that set him on the road that would eventually bring him back to Christian faith was his discovery at the age of 19 of Cicero, who “altered my outlook on life. It changed my prayers to you, O Lord, and provided me with new hopes and aspirations” (3:4, 58). It was Cicero [106-43 BC], not any Christian or biblical writer, who first caused Augustine to take his soul seriously, and to seek wisdom as a means to nurturing that soul.

The second example comes from much later, when he was relearning Christian faith, and he discovered Plotinus, the neo-Platonist, and was amazed to find much that was compatible and indeed fulfilled in Christianity. As Simplicianus explained to him, “In the Platonists . . . God and his Word are constantly implied.” (8:2, 159) The difference is that while Platonism sees the goal, it does not see how to get there:

It is one thing to descry the land of peace from a wooded hilltop and, unable to find the way to it, struggle on through trackless waters . . . It is another thing to follow the high road to that land of peace, the way that is defended by the heavenly Commander. (7:21, 156)

Plotinus, however, like Cicero before him, points Augustine in the right direction, and thus serves as a proto-evangelium. Augustine is at this point somewhat like C.S.Lewis, who, having been convinced by J.R.R.Tolkien that pagan myth merely foreshadowed Christian truth, described himself as “a man of snow at long last beginning to melt.”

As Augustine later realized, this was why the Apostle Paul’s evangelistic strategy with the pagans of Athens had not been to argue from the Old Testament, but to begin with their own poets (Acts 17):

Through your apostle you told the Athenians that it is in you that we live and move and have our being . . . And, of course, the books that I was reading were written in Athens.” (7:9, 146)

God, then, works through unbelievers, sometimes those who are seeking truth (like Cicero, Plotinus, and the Athenian poets of Acts 17), sometimes those who are indifferent or even (like those who encouraged Augustine to go to Rome) “whose hearts were set upon this life of death.” (5:8, 100)

Yet Augustine knows that his movement towards faith is not merely the existential wrestling of one man with his God, and his description makes clear that others are involved in the process. Thus he sheds light on what we might call:

3. The Church’s point-of-view

C.S.Lewis somewhere suggests, perhaps whimsically, that God does not do anything alone that God is able to delegate to human beings , and as the Confessions unfold, it is clear that Augustine encountered many people who helped him along his path. While he acknowledges that a sovereign God speaks and works through unbelievers who do not realize their instrumentality, he finds that God also speaks and works through believers in the Christian community. Monica provides the earliest instance of this. Thus, when he reached adolescence and relative independence, she:

earnestly warned me not to commit fornication and above all not to seduce any man’s wife. . . . the words were yours, though I did not know it. I thought that you were silent and that she was speaking, but all the while you were speaking to me through her, and, when I disregarded her, . . . I was disregarding you (2:3, 46)

Not surprisingly, when Augustine later moved from Carthage to Rome, he tricked Monica into not coming with her. Yet the Hound of Heaven was able to find other mouthpieces. For example, when Firminus sowed seeds of disillusionment with Manicheism, Augustine recognized later that once again God was speaking to him:

This answer [of Firminus] which he gave me, or rather, which I heard from his lips, must surely have come from you, my God. (4:3, 74)

God also speaks through the testimony of converts. Particularly as Augustine’s story moves towards its climax, there is a flurry of people whose experience finally catalyzes his conversion. First, when he goes to consult Simplicianus, “spiritual father of Ambrose”, Simplicianus tells him the story of the conversion of Victorinus, also “a professor of rhetoric, an admirer of the pagan Platonists, at best, merely tolerant of Catholicism.” (Brown 103) Augustine is no fool, and he knows exactly what is happening:

I began to glow with fervour to imitate him. This, of course, was why Simplicianus had told [the story] to me. (8:5, 164)

Shortly afterwards, Ponticianus tells Augustine and Alypius the story of Antony; then of two other converts who became Christians through reading the story of Antony. (8:6) Through these stories, his heavenly pursuer closes in:

[W]hile he was speaking, O Lord, you were turning me around to look at myself. . . . I saw it all and was aghast, but there was no place where I could escape from myself. (8:7, 169)

It is not only the words Christians speak, however, which move Augustine in the direction of faith. Witness is normally by life as well as by words: indeed, the life gives credibility to the words and the words interpret the life. Thus Augustine first experiences the love of God through God’s servants. Monica, of course, is the outstanding example for Augustine of one who lives out the teaching of Christ, and what he says of her influence on her husband Patricius he could equally have said of her influence on him:

[T]he virtues with which you had adorned her, and for which he respected, loved and admired her, were like so many voices constantly speaking to him of you. (9:9, 194)

But Monica is the not the only one whose quality of life struck Augustine. On arriving in Milan, he met Ambrose, who:

received me like a father and, as bishop, told me how glad he was that I had come. My heart warmed to him, not at first as a teacher of the truth . . . but simply as a man who showed me kindness. (5:13, 107)

As Chadwick comments, Ambrose was “was everything a bishop ought to be.” (Chadwick xxv) As for so many people, it was not only the ideas of Christianity which attracted Augustine, but also those truths incarnated in the flesh of real human beings.

Augustine comes to believe too that God works through the prayers of the church. Monica is a woman who prays, and in particular, she prays for her son. When he moved away from the practice of his faith, he says:

[M]y mother . . . wept to you for me, shedding more tears for my spiritual death than other mothers shed for the bodily death of a son. (3:11, 68)

This too can be understood as human partnership with God. As Pascal put it, God gives us prayer so that we may have the dignity of causality. Certainly prayer was one of the ways in which Augustine believed Monica influenced him. He was impressed by the elderly bishop who assured her, “It cannot be that the son of these tears should be lost.” (3:12, 69)

Conclusion

Augustine’s experience of coming to faith suggests that while Stott’s definition of evangelism as “preaching the Gospel” is not untrue (Augustine did hear Ambrose preach the Gospel, after all), it is unhelpful in that it masks the complexity of the process.

Another author, who offers a broader definition which comes closer to encompassing the many facets of Augustine’s experience, is William Abraham. He suggests that evangelism is:

that set of intentional activities which is governed by the goal of initiating people into the kingdom of God for the first time. . . . [Thus] evangelism is . . . more like farming or educating than like raising one’s arm or blowing a kiss.

The evangelizing of Augustine is certainly not a single activity: it is spread over many years, and involves a wide variety of friendships, difficulties, conversations, prayers, encounters, readings, disagreements, self-examinations, mentors, false starts, scripture, and (in the end) a dramatic conversion. “Farming” and “education” might indeed be suitable metaphors for this process.

Even now, however, there are problems with the definition. Would it be right, for example, to call what happened to Augustine “a set of intentional activities”? Certainly Monica is clear about her intentions for her son; certainly Simplicianus is intentional in pointing Augustine towards Christ (even Augustine could see that); and Ambrose was undoubtedly aware in his sermon preparation of who was going to be listening. They all have, as it were, evangelistic intentions. But if there is an overarching intention, linking all these influences, it can only be (to speak Augustine’s language) in the mind of God, who oversees this process from beginning to end. Certainly the resources of the church are brought to bear on him—prayer, counsel, witness, and preaching, for example—but the human evangelists can claim no more than that they are co-workers together with God in God’s work of evangelism.

In light of Augustine’s experience and his reflection on that experience, then, we might expand Abraham’s definition to suggest that:

Evangelism is the work of God through people, specially the church, and circumstances, whose goal is the initiation of people into the Kingdom of God. Evangelism is like farming or educating, a process taking place over time and through countless and varied influences, whose effect is cumulative, and all of which point to faith in Christ. Evangelism is therefore the work of the church as it co-operates with God the supreme evangelist.

Augustine’s Confessions thus provides a salutary corrective for a contemporary theology and praxis of evangelism. In particular, the Confessions point us away from any sense that evangelism is a matter between the individual and God alone, that the key is in an existential and instantaneous “decision”, or that the church’s activism will bring it about. In fact, what the Confessions offers is a pre-modern corrective to a modernistic distortion of evangelism—an understanding that will, ironically enough, equip the church for evangelism in a postmodern world.
The Toronto Journal of Theology, Spring 2007

Notes:

To paraphrase Don Posterski, evangelism has been brought out of the red light district of the church and onto the main street of church life. John P. Bowen, Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2002), 16.

David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis 1991), 408. His Chapter 12, “Elements of an Emerging Ecumenical Missionary Paradigm”, from which this is taken, is illuminating both historically and theologically.

John R.W.Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 30.

George G. III Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity can reach the West . . . Again (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000).

Stott 39.

A superficial survey reveals that this is a theme for a wide range of writers including William J. Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1989), Becky Manley Pippert Out of the Saltshaker (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2nd edition, 1999), George G. Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon 1999), Richard V. Peace Conversion in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1999) and John P. Bowen, Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2002).

David Lodge, using the language of semiotician A.J.Greimas, would have us describe Augustine’s process of moving away from Christian faith and then returning to it, as a “disjunctive journey,” which he defines as “a story of departure and return . . . In this kind of story, the hero and his companions venture out, away from secure home ground, into foreign and hostile territory . . . then return home, exalted or chastened by the experience.” David Lodge Write On (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), 157.

Actually, as Peter Brown points out, in spite of his description of Carthage as a “hissing cauldron of lust” (3:1, 55), within a year he had settled down with a mistress to whom he was faithful for fifteen years. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 39.

Brown, 39.

This imagery of “steps” does not sit well with Karl Barth, who demands: “Is the function of the revelation of God merely that of leading us from one step to the next within the all-embracing reality of divine revelation?” Emil Brunner, Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Professor Emil Brunner and the reply “No!” by Dr. Karl Barth (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), 82.

He uses the image of the spur or goad twice more: “[Y]our goad was thrusting at my heart, giving me no peace . . .” (7:8, 144); “[Y]ou tamed me by pricking my heart with your goad.” (9:4, 185) In all three instances, his word stimulus is the same as that used in the Vulgate of Acts 26:14, Paul’s account of his conversion: “it hurts . . . to kick against the goads.”

This is consistent with the theology of such biblical writers as Isaiah, who has Yahweh refer to the pagan King Cyrus as “my servant” (Isaiah 45:1), and makes use of him to accomplish God’s purposes.

C.S.Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Fontana Books 1959), 179. He explains elsewhere that what Tolkien showed him was that “the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of the poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.” Walter Hooper, ed. The Letters of C.S.Lewis to Arthur Greaves (New York: Collier Books 1979), 427.

“Creation seems to be delegation through and through. He will do nothing simply of Himself which can be done by creatures.” C.S.Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm (London: Geoffrey Bles 1964; London: Fontana Books 1988), 73.

Jesus seems actually to have foreseen this kind of connection: “Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me.” (Luke 10:16)

cf. Bowen, chapter 4.

cf. “[A]ll the time this chaste, devout and prudent woman . . . never ceased to pray at all hours and to offer you the tears she shed for me. . . . Her prayers reached your presence.” (3:11, 68)

In 1984, Haddon Robinson, then President of Denver Seminary, gave an address on the topic, “The Evangelist and the Theologian.”[1] He observed that evangelism and scholarship have generally been estranged during the past two hundred years, to the detriment of both. Yet, Robinson argued, the church needs both “scholarly evangelists” and “evangelistic scholars.” He pointed to examples of those who had integrated the scholarly and the evangelistic modes of ministry, such as the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Jerome, John Calvin, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, William Carey and Francis Schaeffer.

In this article, I will assume that the ministry of evangelism is necessary to the life and health of the church. I will merely suggest at this point that the roots of evangelism are deep in the ministry of Jesus and the model of the apostolic church. It seems to me also that the lasting influence of scholar-evangelists like those on Robinson’s list speaks of its importance. Yet, with such distinguished forebears, it might be asked why the church no longer seems to produce leaders who are both scholarly and evangelistic. In broad strokes, Robinson lays the blame at the feet of the university-based seminary:

Theologians in the seminaries often belittled evangelism… Many in the churches, on the other hand, reacted against seminaries and scholarship.[2]

The issue thus raised rhetorically has been discussed by others in more scholarly fashion. David Kelsey has helpfully summarized the ongoing debate about the nature of theological education in his 1993 book, Between Athens and Berlin.[3] Kelsey contrasts two visions of theological education. The “Athens” model, which goes back to ancient Greece, and which was effortlessly adopted by the early church, stresses “schooling as ‘character formation’.” [4] In Christian terms, it is an education “whose goal is knowledge of God and, correlatively, forming persons’ souls to be holy.”[5] “Berlin,” on the other hand, stands for a type of theological education pioneered by Schleiermacher at the University of Berlin in the early nineteenth century. Here, theology had to justify its existence in a secular Enlightenment, research-oriented university, and it did so by arguing that theology trains people in one of the professions needed by society—the church, which exists alongside medicine and the law.[6]

Charles Wood, in his 1985 discussion of theological education, Vision and Discernment, contends that the shape of theology has been determined ever since by the demands and expectations of “Berlin.”[7] Schleiermacher’s shaping of theological education into three streams, historical theology (which included the Bible), philosophical theology (which included systematic theology), and practical theology (which included the social sciences), thus located “the ‘theological’ character and unity of these disciplines neither in their method nor in their subject matter per se, but in their orientation to a particular purpose”—that purpose being to serve the wider culture.[8]

Not surprisingly, the teaching of evangelism has no place in the Berlin model. William Abraham offers a useful definition of evangelism as “that set of intentional activities which is governed by the goal of initiating people into the kingdom of God.”

[9] This goal, however, is antithetical to the goal of objectivity which is fundamental to the Berlin model. Abraham states the problem thus:

Evangelism is seen as a sectarian issue that requires the kind of prior faith commitments that are out of place in a serious academic environment.[10]

The teaching of evangelism and indeed the practice of evangelism exist more comfortably in an Athens environment where faith commitments are understood as fundamental to life and learning. Thus teaching and training in evangelism, while generally absent from seminary curricula, were common in the Bible colleges which sprang up in the late nineteenth century specifically to provide a preparation for ministry which was free of the constraints on faith imposed by university-based seminaries.[11]

Three developments in the past fifty years have, however, brought about a new opportunity for evangelism and scholarship to grow together again. First, churches have awoken to the ways in which the marriage of church and state under Christendom hampered the integrity of its witness. Second, there has been a move towards seeing the natural locus of evangelism as the life of the local congregation. And, third, there has been an openness to consider the philosophical underpinnings of the whole theological–educational venture. I will touch briefly on the first two of these, and then look in more detail at the latter.

The End of Christendom

The adoption of the Christian faith by the emperor Constantine in the year 313 is generally regarded as a turning point in the relationship of the church to the state. Thus began the project known as Christendom which, while it had many strengths, is widely agreed to have led to the weakening of the distinctive message and values of the Gospel. John Stackhouse comments that “All Bible schools shared the same basic qualities: concern for correct doctrine, a Bible-centered curriculum, and practical training—especially in evangelism.” He also gives a vivid example of how Bible colleges perceived seminaries to be destructive to faith (pp. 80-81).Hauerwas and William Willimon are typical of writers on this subject in pointing out that the church in the world of Christendom was:

a church that had ceased to ask itself the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing that in fact the world had tamed the church.[12]

Rodney Clapp illustrates the relationship of church to world in Christendom like this:

For the better part of recorded history, the church has been the sponsor of western civilization. Like gym-shoe manufacturers who win the right to advertise their wares with the world’s most famous athletes, the church has coveted its association with Western civilization.[13]

The church, he suggests, has been the chaplain on the ship of the state, offering religious services but with no influence over the direction or running of the ship; the captain has been on the bridge with the real power, deciding the direction of the vessel. Thus when Schleiermacher needed to justify the teaching of theology in the modern university, he had to do it in terms that the largely secular university understood: theology prepares pastors who will serve the needs of the state. The chaplain provides religious services, regardless of which direction the ship travels.

Now, however, Christendom is at an end. Hauerwas and Willimon suggest (somewhat tongue in cheek) that it happened in 1963, on a Sunday when the Fox Theater in Greensville SC opened its doors on a Sunday, and went head to head with the church.[14] Or, to return to Clapp’s metaphor, the captain has decided that the chaplain is no longer needed. The question for the chaplain, of course, is: what now? The answer coming from many quarters is an optimistic one. Hauerwas and Willimon are again typical:

The demise of the Constantinian world view…is not a death to lament. The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis means that…Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.[15]

Finally the church can recover its true calling, and can be captain of her own ship—or, rather, follow the direction of Christ, her true captain. This new freedom has many implications which will take some years to think through. One area in which rethinking has already begun is the shape of theological education.

What does a theological education look like which is shaped by the nature of theology itself, indeed by the shape of Christian faith itself, rather than by external and—many would now agree—inappropriate criteria? What should congregational leadership look like in a church whose purpose is mission to an alien world rather than chaplaincy to a semi-pagan state? I would contend that the door is now open for a reconsideration of the place of evangelism in the enterprise of theological education. It was hardly appropriate in a Christendom seminary: in a post-Christendom model, however, it can take on the role and significance it has within the faith itself.

The Church as Evangelizing Community

In recent years, thinking and writing about evangelism has moved away from an emphasis on the gifted individual evangelist and has begun to explore the role of the congregation as the place where healthy evangelism is most likely to happen.[16]It has become popular to say that people often belong before they believe, in the sense that, for many, becoming part of a Christian community often precedes actual profession of Christian faith by months or even years.

There are at least two reasons for this shift. One is pragmatic, a dissatisfaction with forms of evangelism taking place away from the community of the church, such as crusades or television preaching, which may produce “decisions for Christ” but do not always produce baptized, committed members of Christian communities. If, however, the community is the place where the evangelism happens, then converts are already involved in a community of disciples by the time they find themselves believing. Thus congregationally-based evangelism is more likely to nurture long-term disciples than event-oriented evangelism.

The second reason for the shift from individual to communal is, I believe, more philosophical—the postmodern contention that truth is discovered in community. As an illustration, Stanley Grenz paraphrases postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty thus:

Everything one can say about truth or rationality is embedded in the understanding and concepts unique to the society in which one lives… [I]t is impossible for us to rise above human communities.[17]

This point of view, though coming from a secular philosopher, should resonate for Christians. After all, most people do not come to believe in Christ through hearing abstract propositions in a relational vacuum. Christianity believes in a Word which became flesh: we come to believe because we get involved with the person of the living Christ. Thus evangelism happens best (though by no means exclusively: God is sovereign, after all), when we have the opportunity to be with other people who are seeking to know and live God’s truth, and who discuss it in concrete rather than theoretical ways. When the Word is made flesh again in the community of Christ’s people, people discover God’s reality there.

How is this change connected to theological education? If churches are to become this kind of evangelizing communities, it is their pastors who will lead them to become so, and pastors are (in most denominations) trained in seminaries. Thus, if seminaries do not train their future pastors in evangelism, it is unlikely that the congregations they lead will ever develop a ministry of evangelism. Harold Percy speaks passionately to this issue of appropriate leadership for congregations:

Transformational leaders have a clear conviction that God can and will work through their congregation to change lives, and that their congregation of people can be used by God to help change the world. Such vision begins with a clear vision of the evangelizing community and what that community might look like in its particular setting and circumstances.[18]

I hope it is not unfair to suggest that seminaries by and large do not produce this kind of “transformational leader” who can help a congregation become an evangelizing community. One way they might do so is by introducing the teaching of evangelism into the formation of future pastors.

A New Model for Theological Education

Of course, the need for training in evangelism could be addressed simply by hiring adjunct faculty to teach courses on evangelism. Many seminaries in Canada do just that. If, however, evangelism is to be an integral part of the seminary curriculum, rather than an optional appendix, a new model of theological education will have a more lasting effect.

Charles Wood offers just such a paradigm. After reviewing how theological study has been understood historically, Wood proposes that “Christian theology may be defined as a critical enquiry into the validity of Christian witness.”[19] To some, the idea of “witness” is inescapably a freighted term, redolent of revival meetings and street-corner evangelists. Wood’s understanding of “witness,” however, is more theological and nuanced: “Christian witness” is meant here in a comprehensive sense, roughly equivalent to a similarly broad sense of “Christian tradition,” that is, one embracing both the activity of bearing witness (or handing on the tradition) and the substance of what is borne or handed on. The role of theology in relation to witness is thus: an attempt to bring witness to reflection, and to ask about its validity—its faithfulness, its truth, its aptness to its circumstances…an exercise in self criticism, aimed at enabling those so engaged to bear more adequate witness… As such, theology is an aspect of the continuing repentance to which the church and all its members are called.[20]

The heart of theological education, then, is to reflect on the work of witness, the Bible’s own witness to the work of God in history, the church’s witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the practices of the church as in some measure bearing witness to God’s work in the lives of communities and individuals. Wood argues that this “witness” can be considered according to three criteria—historical, philosophical and practical—and proposes that theological study be divided into three main disciplines according to these criteria:

1. Historical. This discipline would look at the history of God’s people, in biblical times and in church history, and ask such questions as:

a. Is a particular instance of historical witness genuine and faithful in its presentation of Christian tradition?

b. How far is it true to the church’s mandate to be a witness to God’s work in Christ?

Wood proposes that this theological discipline should take over the name “historical theology,” and use the tools of historical research to consider the whole of Christian tradition. Study of the Bible would be included under this rubric.

2. Philosophical. This discipline would consider such questions as:

a. What is witness?

b. What may be known about God?

c. In what sense may Jesus be said to be the “Son of God”?

d. Is any given example of Christian witness meaningful and true?

To describe this discipline, Wood proposes to co-opt the term “philosophical theology.”

3. Practical. This discipline would look at questions of Christian witness in human society, and ask such questions as:

a. How did Jesus’ witness impact the society of his day?b. How did the apostles take the gospel to the Gentile world?c. How do cross-cultural missions operate today?

It may also be asked whether Christian witness is, in any given circumstance, appropriate. Is it a fitting enactment of witness for the cultural context in which it is performed? This field of study Wood terms “practical theology.” It would use the scholarly tools of the human sciences, such as sociology, psychology and anthropology, in considering questions such as these.

Wood’s paradigm is helpful as we think about training in evangelism because of the privileged position he gives to the concept of “witness,” which is, after all, a central component in all evangelism. Indeed, he suggests that the aim of studying theology is “enabling those so engaged to bear more adequate witness.”[21] It is true that Wood makes “witness” mean “everything the church is and does as the church”[22]—whether liturgical worship or social service, professional ministry or political involvement—and in a sense he is right to do so since any authentically churchly activity inevitably bears witness to the reality of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, in the New Testament the word “martyria” (witness) refers most frequently to evangelistic witness. For example, of thirty uses of the word “martyria” in the Johannine writings, twenty-seven of them are dominated by the specific sense of “evangelistic witness to the nature and significance of Christ.”[23] Thus any system of theological education which puts the concept of witness at the centre is by implication opening the door to the subject of evangelism.

If Wood’s model of theological education were to be adopted, seminary work would come to include significant theological reflection on evangelism, not as an academic embarrassment, or a cultural aberration from the true task of theology, but as a basic aspect of witness, theology’s fundamental driving force. The three main components of theological education, in Wood’s vision—historical, philosophical and practical—could readily be applied to the subject of evangelism:

1. In studying the historical aspect of witness, for instance, theology would ask:

a. How is evangelism carried out in Scripture?

b. How does Jesus himself bear witness to the Kingdom?

c. How has the church through the centuries followed the evangelistic mandate?

d. What makes Christian evangelism authentic?

e. How has the Church’s evangelism been faithful to the witness of the apostles and of Jesus himself?

2. Within the discipline of philosophical theology, questions would be asked of evangelism:

a. In what sense is the message as proclaimed true?

b. Is it legitimate for the Gospel to claim what it claims?

c. Is it coherent and meaningful?

3. Under the rubric of what Wood calls practical theology, students would ask questions such as:

a. What is an appropriate way to express the Gospel to this person or group, in this culture, at this time?

b. What does evangelistic preaching look like in this culture?

c. What is the place of the catechumenate today?

d. What can I learn from practising evangelists?

e. What can Christians in the West learn from evangelists in other cultures?

If Wood’s model were to be adopted, and the door was thus opened to the teaching of evangelism in seminaries, the benefit would be at least two-fold. On the one hand, the teaching of evangelism would greatly benefit pastors as they prepare for congregational leadership, which in a post-Christendom world must include a sharply-defined sense of mission.

On the other hand, this model would also serve to bring the resources of theology to bear on evangelism. An evangelism that was informed by history, philosophy and social sciences (to name Wood’s three disciplines) would be a very different phenomenon from that which we presently experience—richer, broader, more historically aware, more culturally sensitive, more theologically nuanced—indeed, to use Wood’s own criteria, more faithful, true and appropriate. Then the church would be faced with the exciting prospect of a new generation of scholarly evangelists and evangelistic scholars.

Two Examples

Is this more than a theoretical ideal? Two contemporary evangelists illustrate the possibility of evangelism and theological education enriching one another: the late Terry Winter and Michael Green. Unfortunately, their experience does not shed light on the systemic question of the place of evangelism in theological education, nor can they be taken as examples of how Wood’s paradigm might work. The two are simply ad hoc instances of people in the world of theological education who had a passion for evangelism and found pragmatic ways for the two to work together. Nevertheless, their example is encouraging: these two worlds are not necessarily antithetical to one another.

Terry Winter (1942–1998) was an independent evangelist of Plymouth Brethren background, based in British Columbia. He had his own television show which was seen across Canada on Vision TV. Winter had a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and a Doctorate in Pastoral Theology (a predecessor of the D.Min.) from Fuller Seminary.

Canon Dr. Michael Green, a New Testament scholar, has been Principal of St. John’s Theological College, Nottingham, England, and Professor of Evangelism at Regent College, Vancouver. He is currently Professor of Evangelism at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. Of his many books, perhaps the best-known are Evangelism in the Early Church and I Believe in the Holy Spirit. [24] Green has M.A.s in Classics and Theology, and a B.D. from Cambridge, an honorary D.D. from the University of
Toronto, and a Lambeth D.D.[25]

In interviews I conducted for my Doctor of Ministry thesis,[26]Winter was one of the very few evangelists with whom I spoke who thought that his seminary experience had actually enhanced his evangelistic ministry. During doctoral studies at Fuller Seminary, he had in Paul Jewett a sympathetic supervisor who saw beyond the modernist dichotomy between evangelism and scholarship. In a taped interview, Winter states:

I happened to like systematic theology, so I did my doctorate in systematic theology and evangelism… My Professor, Paul Jewett, [said,] “Terry, we want you to be a better evangelist, so let’s study systematic theology with an evangelistic application. We need more systematic theologians who are evangelists or evangelists who are systematic theologians.”[27]

For Jewett and Winter, healthy evangelism needed good theology. Indeed, the subjects at the heart of the evangelist’s message—sin, the person of Christ, atonement, salvation, repentance, faith, discipleship—are among the most profoundly theological topics anywhere. As Robinson argues:

What does it mean “to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”? …Take that Biblical assertion apart and you are working with theology… Only if we understand the gospel ourselves can we hope to make it clear to others… Theology clarifies our thought, sets what Christians believe in contrast with false doctrine, and helps us make the message clear to outsiders.[28]

I am persuaded that an evangelist trained in systematic theology is likely to be a better evangelist.

Michael Green has been a pioneer in the teaching of evangelism in seminaries. In his role as seminary principal and professor of evangelism, he has always made it a practice to engage students in “real-life” evangelistic opportunities. Like Jewett, he does not see a necessary distinction between the teaching of evangelism and the teaching of more traditional academic subjects. Indeed, he described to me how, when he first went to teach at St. John’s College:

I started to do [evangelistic] missions, and…would take students off on those. When I became Principal, I’d take them off in term time and, boy! they were good at their Hebrew verbs when they got back because their motivation was so high.[29]

He continued this model of education when he was Professor of Evangelism at Regent College in the 1980s, combining classroom teaching with church-based or city-wide missions, where students would form Green’s team, and participate in speaking, testifying and other evangelistic activities.

The testimonies of Green (as teacher) and Winter (as student) suggest that seminary education and training in evangelism can in fact go hand in hand, even though neither Green nor Winter was working in an institution where evangelism had been formally integrated into the curriculum in the way Wood recommends.

Conclusion

For two hundred years, evangelism and scholarship have had little to do with one another. Yet the church in a post-Constantinian, postmodern world is not only in urgent need of scholarly evangelists, but is in a unique position to nurture them. Charles Wood’s proposal for a witness centred model of theological education, while radical, would give a more appropriate place to the teaching of evangelism in seminaries. Terry Winter and Michael Green, on the other hand, show that theology and evangelism can go hand in hand at the practical level. If seminaries pursue this integration, the church may once again produce scholarly evangelists and evangelistic scholars, and be the healthier for it.

[25] A British B.D. is the equivalent of a North American M.Div. A “Lambeth D.D.” is the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is the equivalent of an Oxford D.D., and is considered the equivalent of an earned doctorate.

The title of a book tells you a lot about where the author is coming from. There are two books I use in teaching evangelistic preaching which illustrate this very nicely. One is a book of essays entitled Mastering Contemporary Preaching. (Do you get the picture? Preaching is something which can be “mastered”—as an angry bull might be mastered by a matador. What does that tell you about the authors’ view of preaching? And their view of the preacher?). I use an essay by Bill Hybels out of this book, entitled “Speaking to the Secularized Mind”. The other is by William Willimon and is called The Intrusive Word. Again, the picture is clear: the world is in sin and darkness, but the Word of God intrudes from the outside: so his theological preferences are not hard to see.

These two authors illustrate quite different approaches to what it means to preach evangelistically–to preach the Gospel–and they will provide us a door into a bigger topic which has implications not only for how we preach but for how we understand church and Christian mission in general.

Let us begin by putting the two Williams into conversation.

Hybels is very keen that preachers listen to their culture in order to “connect” with secular hearers. He says, for example:

As we learn the way non-Christians think . . . we can speak the words of Christ in a way they’ll hear.”

The emphasis is on shaping the message in such a way that outsiders can hear and understand. It would seem to be a straightforward and commendable suggestion.

Willimon, however, is convinced that this is completely the wrong approach, and understands this idea of “hearing” of the Gospel as problematic:

People bring many things with them in their listening to a sermon. Having been preconditioned, their ears are not in tune with the message. . . Desiring too desperately to communicate, at any cost, can lead us into apostasy. . . . Can we preachers respect the gospel enough to allow people not to understand it?

Willimon’s point is that the preacher should not, must not, try to speak in a way that the hearers can understand. That is a sure recipe for getting it wrong. As soon as I try to adapt the message to my (sinful) hearers, I am inevitably watering it down. There is nothing in their experience which will prepare them to hear and understand the message, because the Gospel is so counter-intuitive to sinful people.

For Hybels, the fact that this is a consumer culture means that we have to respond to our hearers as the consumers they are, and give them what they want. He knows that his hearers will treat their response to the Gospel as they would the purchase of a used car: that is their normal way of functioning. It may take them six months “simply to kick the tires, look at the interior, and check the title before he finally can say, ‘I’ll buy it!’” So he makes allowances for them and seeks to be relevant:

An unchurched person who does venture into a church assumes that whatever is spoken will not be relevant to his life. That’s why I select 60 to 70 percent of my illustrations from current events. I read Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, Forbes, and usually Business Week. . . . Why? Because when I can use a contemporary illustration, I build credibility. The unchurched person says, “He’s in the same world I’m in. . . .” When I quote Augustine, he feels like I’m not playing in the same ball park.

Relevance for Willimon, however, is precisely what the preacher should not strive for. If your hearers find you relevant, then you are not preaching the Gospel. If the Gospel is preached authentically, the person outside of Christ will find it unintelligible:

We preachers so want to be heard that we are willing to make the gospel more accessible than it really is, to remove the scandal, the offense of the cross, to deceive people into thinking . . . that it is possible to hear the gospel while we are still trapped in outmoded or culturally conditioned patterns of thought and hearing.

Hybels’ attempt to establish a common footing with his hearers is misguided, because:

“Common human experience” doesn’t exist, and even if it did, it should not be confused with the gospel. . . . Preaching means to engender experience we would never have had without the gospel.

585 >> 758 wordsHistory of this conflict

This conflict is hardly a new one, however. In fact, it runs like different-coloured but intertwined strands through the whole history of Christian missions.

Let me give three more illustrations, and then suggest what lies behind the conflict, and how we might resolve it. (I will only say at this point that my conclusion is not that both are correct, tempting though that is. That would be too easy!)

1. Barth and Brunner

In 1934, Emil Brunner published a book entitled Nature and Grace. In it he argued from the existence of general revelation to the validity of natural theology. General revelation is God’s self-disclosure which is “universally available” and which “it is impossible for anyone not to know”, whether or not they have a Bible, whether or not they know about Christ. Natural theology is the deductions people then draw from that revelation, “the attempt to attain an understanding of God . . . by means of rational reflection, without appealing to special revelation.”

This has a very practical bearing on evangelism. Thus, Brunner argues, an evangelist can appeal to people to repent, because they already know from general revelation that God exists, that God is a righteous lawgiver, and that they have failed to keep that law:

Only because men [sic] somehow know the will of God are they able to sin. A being which knew nothing of the law of God would be unable to sin.

According to Brunner, there is a “connecting point” in human nature, in the mind or in the conscience, with which the Gospel will connect, and which will enable the Gospel to be understood.

Barth replied to Brunner’s thesis with what is generally considered the shortest title in theological publishing: Nein!–No! He has no patience for a discussion of general revelation and natural theology because he is convinced that “[the] subject . . . [of natural theology] differs fundamentally from the revelation in Jesus Christ.” Sinful human beings, because their powers of reasoning are distorted and naturally inclined against God, cannot draw accurate theological deductions from general revelation. Any theology they construct is inevitably going to be partial and misleading, even idolatrous. And in that kind of anthropocentric theology, there is no longer any Gospel, nor any need for a Gospel.

This all sounds fairly abstract: why would anybody (except theologians) get upset about such an idea? But I suspect you can already see the lines of connection. If Barth is right, then Willimon’s approach to preaching makes perfect sense. If the Gospel is the powerful word of the Creator, breaking into our sinful and helpless condition from the outside, and turning the world upside down—or, better, right side up—then it needs no help from us. If you need surgery, the doctor is unlikely to need your help or advice: the only thing you can do is submit to the anesthetic and let the doctor operate.

But if Brunner is right, that there are connecting points in a sinful world which will predispose people to understand the Gospel, then Hybels’ approach is more appropriate. On this view, preachers need to find the connecting points, otherwise their words will be wasted.

473 >> 458 words

The second example takes us back into the world of mission and evangelism, which is where this issue belongs, and where it most frequently fought over.

2. De Nobili and Tournon

In 1604, a young Jesuit, Robert De Nobili, arrived in India, and began an unusual form of missionary work. Few Indians were being converted because there had been an emphasis on the need for converts to adopt European customs and dress, and many Indians were too committed to their own culture to do so. Nobili decided to become an Indian in order to win Indians. He gave up anything that might cause offence, such as the eating of meat and the wearing of leather shoes. He adopted the saffron robe of the ascetic holy man. He impressed his hearers by his perfect command of the Tamil language, and by quoting with ease from famous Indian authors.
At the end of five years, a number of leading Brahmans were baptized. Naturally they retained their Indian customs and dress. This was not as unproblematic as it sounds, however. Some customs were on the borderline between having cultural and religious significance. More clearly a problem was the fact that Brahmans would have nothing to do with people of lower castes, and were suspicious of a religion that potentially embraced all castes, and thus implicitly threatened the existence of the caste system itself.
Pope Gregory XV pronounced himself in favour of De Nobili’s approach. A hundred years later, however, Charles Tournon, an investigator from a later Pope, saw things differently, and recommended a rejection of all cultural concessions:
[H]e issued a decree in sixteen points, wholly unfavourable to the methods and practices of Nobili and his Jesuit followers. Ceremonies which had been suppressed as offensive to Indian ideas were to be restored in detail. Caste differences were not to be observed, as they had been in the past. Practices regarded as too nearly allied to Hindu superstition were to be suppressed.

De Nobili, it seems to me, is in the tradition of Hybels and Brunner. He is willing to sacrifice everything of western origin. He finds as many points of connection as he can within Hindu culture and uses these to construct a bridge over which the Christian Gospel can travel.

Tournon, however, is an ancestor of Barth and Willimon. From his point of view, Nobili has sold out by his concessions to local culture. Hindu theology and Christian theology are of different origins, and any attempt to merge them is inevitably going to result in a watered-down Gospel. But it is not only theology: if adopting the culture means that the inequities of the caste system are to be maintained, then that is an outright denial of the Gospel which removes distinctions between “Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free.”

461 >> 440 words

3. Tertullian and Justin Martyr

A parallel tension exists in the attitude of the early church fathers. Admittedly the weight is on one side, but the other side also exists, represented most famously by Tertullian:
What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? . . . Our instruction comes from “the porch of Solomon,” who had himself taught that “the Lord should be sought in simplicity [singleness, purity] of heart.” Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel!
Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. Christianity has no need of help from non-Christian philosophies, whether Stoic or Platonic. The Gospel, being of God, stands on its own feet. It sits in judgement on the shortcomings of other views. I can almost hear Willimon cheering.
The opposite point-of-view is represented (among others) by Justin Martyr:
Whatever either lawgivers or philosophers [like Socrates] uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Word. But since they did not know the whole of the Word, which is Christ, they often contradicted themselves.. Christ . . . was partially known even by Socrates (for He was and is the Word who is in every man).
“Christ was partially known by Socrates” and other philosophers. True, he did not know everything: “they did not know the whole of the Word [and thus] contradicted themselves.” As Simplicianus explained to Augustine, “In the Platonists . . . God and his Word are constantly implied.” Thus the person who has read Plato will be looking in the right direction. Christianity will simply provide them the right path which they will readily embrace.

286 words

Summary so far

These two schools of thought could be characterised as those who believe there is a degree of continuity (large or small) between the Christian revelation and culture, and those who say there is some degree of discontinuity (either absolute, radical, or partial) between Christianity and culture.

In a postmodern world, we no longer have to pretend to be objective in our opinions, though we should be upfront about our biases, so at this point let me declare my interest in this topic! I confess that I have preached the Gospel under titles like The Gospel according to Calvin and Hobbes (and in this context I should clarify that, yes, I do mean the cartoon), Jesus is Alive, Elvis is Alive: What’s the Difference? What Jesus says to the Smashing Pumpkins, and the Gospel according to Jim Carrey, to name just a few. (I say “I have preached the Gospel,” but some would obviously doubt it!) In other words, my evangelistic practice is firmly on the side of continuity, so I have a strong reaction towards Willimon, but at the same time I confess that Hybels makes me nervous.
Is there a way to resolve this tension?

If it is not too presumptuous, let me begin with our doctrine of God, because all else flows from how we understand God. In every generation, the church has mined the resources of Scripture for clues and images of God to help it understand its identity and its role. The end of Christendom in the second half of the twentieth century has prompted another such theological reassessment: if the church does not exist as a chaplain to the state, if we can no longer assume that everybody in a so-called “Christian country” is in fact a follower of Jesus Christ, what then is the church to be and do? As a result, beginning with a lecture by Karl Barth in 1932, a fresh theological emphasis has emerged of God as a Missionary God, and of God’s work as the missio dei. As David Bosch puts it: “[M]ission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. . . . In the emerging ecclesiology, the church is seen as essentially missionary. . . . [T]he church is not the sender but the sent.”

What I want to argue is that the balance of scripture, doctrine and missionary experience are on the side of continuity, while at the same time I want to listen carefully to the cautions of the discontinuity school. To do this, I am going to draw on three sources: the writings of two missiologists, on two Christian doctrines, and finally on scripture.

A. Missiologists

So what light do missiologists have to shed on the question? I want to offer you two names:

Lamin Sanneh

Sanneh is an African from the Gambia who teaches at Yale. Many authors have one big idea which they then elaborate in different ways, and Sanneh’s big idea has to do with translation. Christianity, he argues, is intrinsically translatable. In this, it differs from Islam, which is diluted by the act of translation. (Sanneh speaks as a convert from Islam.) In Christianity, however, since the earliest days, the Bible and the Gospel have been translated into different cultures and languages. Far from being diluted by this process, Sanneh argues, Christianity actually gains strength from being translated. His main illustrations are from Africa, where he sees missionaries as having put power into the hands of African converts by giving them the Bible in their own language.

One implication of Sanneh’s thinking is that culture and language are God-given vehicles for the church’s mission. There is no culture-free mission and no culture-free Gospel. Although all cultures are distorted by sin, the Gospel always comes to people in the cultural forms of those who bring it, and it is always received into the cultural forms of those who hear it. There is no alternative: none of us has a place to stand that is outside all cultures. And the strange thing is that God seems to bless this arrangement, despite its limitations.

221 words

Lesslie Newbigin

Newbigin spent half his life as a missionary in India, ultimately as a bishop with the Church of South India. He returned to the UK in the 1970’s and became a trainer of missionaries. Like Sanneh, Newbigin is in some ways in the discontinuity tradition–he is very emphatic about the uniqueness of the revelation that comes to us in Christ–but he parts company with them at a significant point, and finally argues not for “total discontinuity” but for “radical discontinuity.”

One influence on him, he says, was again the issue of translation. Many cultures have a word in their own language for the supreme being, the omnipotent creator. Should a Bible translator make use of that local word? How far does the term for God in the receiving (“receptor”) culture resemble the Bible’s understanding of God? Indeed, those on the side of discontinuity would ask how can there be any real similarity between a pre-Christian understanding of God and the unique revelation of God which comes through Jesus. Is not any image of God apart from Christ necessarily idolatrous?

What Newbigin discovered was that Bible translators around the world almost always used the local name for God. And, he notes, on the few occasions when translators did not do that:

the converts have simply explained the foreign word in the text of their bibles by using the indigenous name for God.

You can imagine the conversation: “What’s that funny word you just read?” “Theos.” “What’s that mean?” “Oh, it’s the word the missionaries like to use for God.” “Well, if that’s what they meant, why on earth didn’t they say so?”

Of course, there is a certain irony in the fact that we are even discussing the propriety of this when, as English-speaking Christians, we use the word “God,” which was itself a pre-Christian term and which those who first translated the Bible into the Germanic languages, like Luther and Wycliffe, decided was an adequate vehicle for the good news of Jesus. I am sure we would say that since then our understanding of “God” has been filled out and transformed by the understanding of God we have received from the Gospel, and that is certainly true. Nevertheless, we need to note that the pagan term “God” was the starting point.

383 words

B. Reading Christian doctrine

Each time we emphasise something different in the nature of God—whether God as Sufferer, God as Liberator, or God as Missionary–we are pressed to rethink all other doctrines in light of it. So if we think primarily of God as a missionary God, reaching out to the world with forgiveness, healing, and new life, what effect does that have on how we read other doctrines? Traditionally, the argument between continuity and discontinuity has focused on the doctrine of revelation: how is God revealed to the world? Yet I think other doctrines also shed light on the issue. Let me suggest just two:

a) Pneumatology: Where is the Spirit at work?

Barth observes: “It seems that behind [Brunner’s] re-introduction of natural theology a ‘new’ doctrine of the Holy Spirit wants only too logically to break forth.” And indeed, how we understand the doctrine of the Spirit is crucial for understanding this topic.

Willimon would say that the Spirit works through the preaching of Christ, and I would agree. Yet at the same time the Spirit is always and everywhere at work throughout the world, drawing attention to Christ and glorifying Christ, even where Christ is not yet named. The Spirit works through all of God’s revelation: through general revelation to point people towards Christ, and through Scripture and preaching to make Christ real. As John’s Gospel makes clear, the Spirit convicts people of sin, righteousness and judgement, even before they hear the Gospel. The Spirit prepares people to hear the Gospel.
b) Grace: Where does grace find us?

Grace is the coming of God to the world and to the human heart in forgiveness, renewal, and reconciliation. But how is that grace known? One crucial answer would be: through the preaching of the Gospel. But there is more. Wesley, perhaps the most theologically reflective of evangelists, coined the term “prevenient grace”. In his understanding, there is a grace that prepares a person, softens their heart, makes them aware of their need, to hear the Gospel and receive Christ.

Don Richardson, pioneer missionary in Irian Jaya in the 1960’s, puts it this way: “[T]he God who prepared the gospel for all peoples [has] also prepared all peoples for the gospel.” Thus a snide witticism like the one Charles Campbell quotes: “[do not try to] meet the listeners where they are because too often they are ‘in the wrong place’” is actually to underestimate the work of the Spirit in the world. By the providence of God, no-one is in the wrong place.

537 >> 422 words

C. Biblical roots

This is not the place for a full examination of relevant Biblical texts, of which there are many, so let me just highlight one passage with a direct bearing on these issues. It is instructive not least because it shows Paul preaching the Gospel to an audience which knows nothing of special revelation: Acts 17, the story of Paul at Athens.

In the sermon he preaches on Mars Hill, Paul draws on three “points of contact” with the pagan culture he is addressing: one, the altar to the unknown god (he assumes the legitimacy of equating this god with the God he is preaching); two, the pre-Christian beliefs of Stoics and Epicureans which he confidently weaves into his sermon; and three, the poets’ praise of the god Zeus. He seems to have no doubt that God has been at work in this pagan culture before he ever got there, preparing the people in however shadowy a way to receive the Gospel. And so he does not hesitate to make use of what he considers evidences that the Spirit of Christ has been at work preparing the Athenians to hear the Gospel of Christ.

As it happens, Willimon has written a commentary on Acts. Let me read you what he says about this chapter. He begins by expressing compassion for the Athenians and their spiritual plight :

Idolaters they may be, but at least they are searching. . . . Their religious yearning . . . is the inarticulate and uninformed yearning of the pagan for . . . God. . . . The church, rather than standing back from pagan religiosity, pointing our fingers in righteous indignation, should, like Paul at Athens, minister to their searching.

He suggests that it is important to connect with what the Athenians already know of God:

Appealing to their knowledge of creation (for he could not simply recite Scripture to pagans who were ignorant of Scripture) and to our common humanity, Paul asserts that his God “made the world and everything in it.”

This appears to be a different approach from that recommended in The Intrusive Word, where (for instance) rather than praising the appeal to “our common humanity”, we are informed that “‘[c]ommon experience’ [between believers and unbelievers] doesn’t exist.” Or again, does not the approach of Acts 17 come close to assuming the validity of natural theology? Willimon concedes that it does:

In reasoning from the natural world toward faith in God, Luke’s Paul borders upon a “natural theology”–our observation of the natural world and its wonders is a forerunner of faith. . . . In citing the verses of a pagan poet (17:28), in drawing upon the pagan’s experience of the world, Paul hopes to move them to faith by way of the natural world.

It would probably be unkind to suggest that Willimon’s emphasis on discontinuity simply becomes untenable as he tries to deal responsibly with the text of Scripture.

584 >> 491 words

Conclusion

To some extent, the answer to our dilemma is that both Hybels and Willimon are necessary. After all, missionaries who are in the front line of mission are in constant danger. As they strain forward to new fields of mission, and come close to a non-Christian culture, they may lose perspective, fall into syncretism, and sell out on the Gospel. Being a missionary is a risky though necessary business. They need the help, the partnership, of those who are looking in the other direction, back to the tradition. The missionary asks, Is this particular feature of the culture a God-given point of contact, or am I reading it wrongly? And a sympathetic theologian will enter into conversation, and offer a yes, no, or maybe. There is no place for the missionary to become intolerant of academic theologians; nor is there any place for theologians to scoff at the efforts of front-line missionaries. Both are legitimate ministries within the body of Christ, and in the mission of God.

But I promised I would not end simply by saying both Hybels and Willimon are right. That would be too easy. So let me modify what I have just said by suggesting that one of these two is more right than the other. Here is an image of G.K.Chesterton’s:

There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is to be more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. . . . To have avoided . . . all [heresies] has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

I would suggest that Chesterton’s image for orthodoxy can equally well be applied to the mission of the church as a whole—since mission is a central expression of the orthodox faith he is talking about. The missionary church is a chariot whirling through history, sometimes racing ahead, sometimes getting off track, sometimes stumbling. If it is not too whimsical, let me suggest an allegory: that the horse is the Gospel: it is after all “the power of God for salvation”, and it moves through time and space, drawing all nations into its train.

What then is Hybels? To me, he represents the missionary impulse as God’s Spirit communicates it to the church, as people make themselves available to follow the galloping of God’s Spirit. So what is his kind of ministry? Maybe we could say that his ministry (and that of other front-line missionaries) is the chariot itself, representative of the church following the lead of the Spirit.

What then is Willimon? His role seems to me to caution over-enthusiastic missionaries to remember the Gospel, to remind them that mission is God’s work not theirs, to remind them that the world is no friend to God or to the Gospel. So where does that fit in my allegory? Maybe this is the role of the reins, offering direction, keeping the chariot on track, preventing swerving to left or right. Or maybe this represents the brakes (I guess even a chariot has to have brakes), slowing the chariot down as it goes round a sharp corner, preventing disaster as it comes too close to a precipice.

Which is more important? In one way, it is a silly question, since both are needed: but surely the point of the chariot is to move forward. This is the way the horse’s energy is pulling. The church is the instrument of God’s mission in the world. I would suggest therefore that the missionary impulse (of Hybels) is the primary one, and the corrective impulse (of Willimon) a secondary one. Both are needed—but the point of the chariot is to follow the power of the horse, and to reach the promised destination.

For Christians to affirm any truthfulness in natural theology invites “[the] assimilation of God to nature and of revelation to history, and thus the reduction of theology to anthropology.” Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Barth, Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Edinburgh: T.&.T.Clark, 1990), 136.

At one point, the disagreement is expressed in terms of a metaphor. Brunner distinguishes between natural revelation and special revelation with an image which suggests complementarity: “from nature we know the hands and feet but not the heart of God.” (25) While there are some things we can deduce accurately about the character of the Creator from looking at the creation, it is only from Christ that we truly know the Creator’s heart. Barth counters with Calvin’s version of the same image: “Christ is the imago in which God makes manifest to us not only his heart but also his hands and feet.” ( 74) There is no image of God outside of Christ: anything we know of God we know through Christ.

Three fairly straightforward examples: after the First World War, when Romantic ideals of progress and human perfectibility had been shattered, theologians rediscovered Biblical emphases on the darkness of the human condition and the transcendence of God. Again, after the Second World War and the accompanying Holocaust, the need for a theodicy led to a fresh discovery of a theology of the suffering of God. And in the Liberation movements of the 1960’s, there was a fresh emphasis on the Biblical image of God as the great Liberator. This is not to say on the one hand that all such emphases are of equal value, nor on the other that they are only of passing cultural interest: it is merely an observation that this happens.

A friend from Brock University told me that, some years ago, there were protests from Muslim students when a new chaplain was appointed, because he was not born in an Arab country and could not speak Arabic.

Sanneh suggests that this power directly fuelled the independence movements in Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as well as the growth of the phenomenal growth of the church in Africa after the missionaries left: “[B]etween 1964 and 1984 Christian numbers increased from about 60 million to roughly 240 million.” Lamin Sanneh

So is Sanneh on the side of continuity or of discontinuity? See what you think: “The central premise of missionary preaching is the reality of God: Creator, Sustainer, Judge and Redeemer. The specific Christian understanding of this is expressed in the understanding of Jesus Christ as the historical and personal manifestation of God’s power. [That sounds remarkably like discontinuity. But then he goes on:] When they came to Africa, missionaries began with a methodical inquiry into the nature and character of God among Africans, and before long it was obvious Africans had a deep sense of the reality of God. That resolved a fundamental dilemma for mission, for there would be no need to lay the groundwork of the concept of God. [Yet that sounds suspiciously like continuity].” Sanneh 158.

The Finality of Christ, cited in Hunsberger 205. “[T]he Christian sees the Gospel as the end of religion. God has spoken his word in Jesus Christ and whatever echoes of that word are to be found in the religions and cultures of mankind can be heard as echoes, not as parallel and independent messages.” “Teaching Religion in a Secular Plural Society,” cited in Hunsberger 214.

Or again: “Obviously the missionary can only begin by using words which have some meaning for his hearers. . . . He can only introduce what is new by provisionally accepting what is already there in the minds of the hearers.” There is the voice of continuity, the recognition that one has to speak in the language of the culture, and begin where people are at. Yet he goes on immediately to say: “What if the new thing is in fact the primal truth by which all else has to be confronted and questioned?

How do you begin to explain that which in the end must be accepted as the beginning of all explanation? That is the problem of the evangelist.” Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 2.

Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1995), 170, in Hunsberger 206.

It is arguable that the pre-Christian understanding of “God” was closer to the biblical notion than that of contemporary western culture at large.

Brunner and Barth, 94

Cf. “[T]he Holy Spirit is universally present through the whole fabric of the world and yet uniquely present in Christ, and, by extension, in the fellowship of his disciples. . . .[T]hat same Spirit also speaks in the hearts of all men, for God has nowhere left himself without a witness that always, to a greater or lesser degree, points to Christ.” John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God (SCM 1972), 180-181. Cf. “The eternal Spirit has been at work in all ages and all cultures making men aware and evoking their response, and always the one to whom he was pointing and bearing witness was the Logos, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” (191) Lest it be thought that Taylor may be opening up a distinction between the Spirit and Christ, it is important to emphasise that the Spirit at work in the world is the same Spirit of Jesus Christ who is also at work in the preaching of the cross. The danger is epitomized by a writer like Philip Rosato, who speaks so consistently of the Creator Spirit and the Redeemer Spirit that they almost become two separate entities:
“[T]he Redeemer Spirit so monopolizes Barth’s attention that the Creator Spirit has no power to lead man to truth which is not explicitly christological. . . . Barth attributes to the Spiritus Redemptor a function which is really that of the Spiritus Creator. . . .” Rosato wants to understand the Spirit’s work “in a way which is free from the Word and yet endowed with equal ontological validity.” Philip J. Rosato, The Spirit as Lord: the Pneumatology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1981), 149-151. Wesleyan scholar Victor Shepherd defines it thus: “Prevenient grace is the hidden work of God in the heart of every human being quietly preparing that person for the moment when the morning dawns and the truth flashes and he who has always been the light of the world is finally recognized and acknowledged to be this.” Victor Shepherd, Sermon: The Heart of the Matter, November 2001 (http://www.victorshepherd.on.ca/Sermons/theheart.htm). Cf. Prevenient grace is the hidden movement of God’s Spirit within us moving us towards that moment when we consciously embrace the grace of the crucified and find God’s love flooding our hearts. Victor Shepherd, Sermon: A Note on God’s Love, May 1997
(http://www.victorshepherd.on.ca/Sermons/a_note_on_god’s_love.htm)

Don Richardson, Eternity in their Hearts (Ventura CA: Regal Books 1981), 33. As Clark Pinnock says, the “Spirit works everywhere in advance of the church’s mission, preparing the way for Christ.” Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press 1996), 192.

In 1959, C.S.Lewis wrote to BBC producer Lance Sieveking, who had apparently proposed that a movie be made of The Chronicles of Narnia. Here is part of Lewis’ response:

I am absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wld. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wld. be to me blasphemy.
All the best,
yours
C. S. Lewis

So is he turning in his grave at the release of the first two of what is planned as a whole series of Narnia movies? Personally, while I have reservations about both movies, I thought they were neither buffoonery nor nightmare, and I would like to think that, with the advances in movie making since 1959 and the co-direction of Lewis’ stepson Douglas Gresham, he might have been pleased after all.

Most churches have been excited about the movies, and various websites have offered various ways to turn it into a great evangelistic opportunity. One website, for example, had pages for youth groups, one for “Becoming a Parish promoter”, and one for starting a study group. Another invited us to find a Lion party near to us; and a third introduced us to four “deeper truths” (which bore a suspicious resemblance to the Four Spiritual Laws) to be found in the Chronicles. This enthusiasm will probably continue for as long as the series is turned into movies.

Was this the right way to think about the movies, however? My fear is that on the one hand people went expecting the wrong thing and were disappointed, and that on the other hand they may have missed what Lewis the evangelist is actually trying to do, and thus fail to benefit from what the movie does have to offer.

Definitions of Evangelism

First, it would probably be useful to offer a definition of evangelism. In one sense I can’t improve on J.I.Packer’s 1961 definition of evangelism as “just preaching the Gospel.” In teaching, however, I expand that definition in two directions: one is to say that “evangelism is those words which help people take steps towards faith in Jesus.” In putting it that way, I am deliberately expanding Packer’s definition of “preaching” to include all words whose intention is evangelistic, whether it’s conversation, a Bible study, a word of testimony, or an evangelistic book—not just formal preaching. I also want to introduce the idea that evangelism is a process. There is some evidence, for example, that Canadians need to hear the Gospel nine times before they respond (I’m sure Americans get it much more quickly), and that the process of moving to a response takes on average 4 years.

Secondly, it is helpful to know something of C.S.Lewis’ background. He grew up as an Anglican in Northern Ireland, was alternately bored and terrified by church, and by the age of thirteen declared himself an atheist, which he remained for fifteen years. During those years, however, he had what he later came to recognise as spiritual experiences, flashes of what he called “joy” which spoke to him of something beyond present material experience. These experiences came to him through the beauty of nature and through ancient mythology, particularly Norse mythology.

For years, he made no connection between his experiences of joy and Christianity, until he made friends with J.R.R.Tolkien, who argued that mythology contained glimpses of God’s truth, and that all mythology pointed to Jesus Christ and was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. As Lewis wrote later:

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences.

Once he had acknowledged that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, he started going to church again, and began to explore and write about his newfound faith. From that time on, he published on average one book per year till his death in 1963, from the academic (such as The Allegory of Love) to popular theology (The Screwtape Letters) to the fictional (Narnia and the science fiction trilogy), every one demonstrating a deep integration of his faith with his learning and his life.

So what did Lewis think about evangelism? He was ambivalent in his attitude to conventional evangelism. In an interview with Decision magazine in 1963 (six months before his death), he said, “There are many different ways of bringing people into His Kingdom, even some ways that I specially dislike.” Among other things, he clearly disliked evangelical jargon. When Sherwood Eliot Wirt asked him: “Would you say that the aim of Christian writing, including your own writing, is to bring about an encounter of the reader with Jesus Christ?” Lewis replied: “That is not my language, yet it is the purpose I have in mind.”

At Oxford, he was reluctant to identify with the OICCU, at that time the only evangelical student organisation at Oxford, and instead started his own student society, The Socratic Club, where Christian faith could be debated. He did once address the OICCU on the topic “What is Christianity?” Lady Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter of Martyn Lloyd-Jones) called it “a really splendid, perfect talk.” Yet when a student, probably feeling that Lewis had failed to close the deal, asked “If everything you’re saying is true, what should we do about it?” Lewis replied, “God forbid that I should intervene in such a personal matter. Go and talk to your priest about that.” That’s hardly a standard evangelistic response.
Lewis’ High View of Evangelism

Yet Lewis had a high view of evangelism itself. He wrote: “The glory of God, and, as our only means to glorying him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.” And for him, this was not merely a theory. He wrote in a letter in 1949:

I have two lists of names in my prayers, those for whose conversion I pray, and those for whose conversion I give thanks. The little trickle of transferences from List A to List B is a great comfort.

He developed an understanding that different people with different gifts contribute different things to the process of evangelism. His contribution, he came to feel, was very specific. In a paper on apologetics, he said:

I turn now to the question of the actual attack. This may be either emotional or intellectual. If I speak only of the intellectual kind, that is not because I undervalue the other but because, not having been given the gifts necessary for carrying it out, I cannot give advice about it.

He came to believe therefore that evangelism was best done by a team:

I am not sure that the ideal missionary team ought not to consist of one who argues and one who (in the fullest sense of the word) preaches. Put up your arguer first to undermine their intellectual prejudices; then let the evangelist proper launch his appeal. I have seen this done with great success.

He had seen it done because in at least two instances he was the “arguer.” When Lewis started doing lectures to the RAF during the Second World War, he worked with an English bishop, A.W.Goodwin-Hudson, to whom he said:

I wish I could do the heart-stuff . . . I can’t. . . I wish I could. . . . I wish I could press home to these boys how much they need Christ. . . . You do the heart stuff and I’ll do the head stuff.

They agreed that Lewis would first of all do a 20-minute lecture presenting the rational case for Christianity, and Goodwin-Hudson would then follow up with the evangelistic appeal. Lewis adopted the same approach by teaming up with Stephen Olford for a crusade at Westminster Chapel in London.

As far as I know, Lewis never wrote about evangelism as a process. But clearly he sees himself as playing a part in the work of evangelism, though not the only part or necessarily the most important part. The way he understood his role was as preparation for the Gospel rather than the Gospel itself, “preparatio evangelica rather than evangelium”

If this is how Lewis sees his own role as an evangelist—as an intellectual John the Baptist—there are nevertheless two distinct ways in his writing in which he fulfils this role. I am thinking of Mere Christianity and the Narnia stories.

Mere Christianity began life as a series of radio broadcasts on the BBC in 1941; these were followed by two other similar series’. They were finally published in the form in which we know them in 1952. At the beginning of the series, he wrote to Dr. James Welch, the producer of the series to explain what he was trying to do:

It seems to me that the New Testament, by preaching repentance and forgiveness, always assumes an audience who already believe in the law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it. In modern England we cannot at present assume this, and therefore most apologetic begins a stage too far on. The first step is to create, or recover, the sense of guilt. Hence if I give a series of talks I should mention Christianity only at the end, and would prefer not to unmask my battery till then.

His intention, then, was to start where people are at—with humankind’s innate sense of right and wrong—and to work back from there to the necessity of a lawgiver, and thence to a sense of sin (our failed responsibility to the lawgiver), and to a saviour from sin. It was a rational, logical, step by step approach, illustrated profusely with brilliant analogies and metaphors.

Although he said it was preparation for the Gospel—what Schaeffer would have called pre-evangelism—in fact it has been the means of countless people coming to faith—most famously, in our generation, Charles Colson. Which is indicative, I think, of the fact that God is no respecter of our neat categories like evangelism and pre-evangelism. Some of what is intended as pre-evangelism actually brings people to faith; some that is intended to be directly evangelistic is for some people only early preparation for their conversion much later.

The Purpose of the Narnia Books

The Narnia series began in 1950 with the publication of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . This was two years before Mere Christianity, but six years after the last of the radio broadcasts. Whether or not Lewis was aware of it at first, the Narnia stories demonstrate a quite different approach to evangelism. They do not begin with an attempt to establish a sense of sinfulness. They do not argue in a linear fashion for the truth of Christianity. In fact they do not argue at all. After all, they are children’s fantasies.

Perhaps then we are wrong to think of them as evangelistic. But Lewis’ own words confirm his evangelistic intention:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. . . . [S]upposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

Lewis is concerned for people like himself who thought they knew Christianity, but had never really known or experienced its true nature. In his life, his experience of church on the one hand and his experience of the things that touched him most deeply on the other were totally different. It took many years before he came to realise (through Tolkien) that the thrill he found in mythology was not an end in itself but merely (to use his own image) a signpost pointing him for its fulfillment toward faith in Christ. The mythology of Narnia, he felt, might provide a similar kind of signpost to point people to Christ.

Lewis is the master of metaphor, and it is not surprising that he gives another image for what he was doing in Narnia to his friend and biographer, George Sayer:

His idea, as he once explained to me, was to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life. He hoped they would be vaguely reminded of the somewhat similar stories that they had read and enjoyed years before. “I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination.”

The Gospel may not yet have reached their minds or their wills, but if their imagination has been captured by Narnian images of redemption, then when they hear the Gospel, it will resonate more readily because of that preparatory work done by Narnia.

Thus Lewis is still John the Baptist, preparing the ground for the hearing of the Gospel, perhaps years later. Only now, unlike the Lewis of Mere Christianity, he is primarily trying to win the imagination, not the mind.

Not that evangelism was Lewis’ initial motive for writing the Narnia stories. Indeed, he had no idea of even writing a series at first. He says that the images came first (the faun, the queen, the lion), then the fairy tale form, and only afterwards the theological realization of how the books might be helpful in evangelism.

So what is there in the Chronicles that can be understood as evangelistic or pre-evangelistic? Barth says somewhere: “The best apologetic is good dogmatics.” If so, there is a wealth of good apologetics in the Chronicles, because behind Lewis the storyteller is Lewis the teacher, fleshing out almost every Christian doctrine. There are theologies of creation, the imago dei, the cultural mandate, and the fall; there is a Redeemer who dies because of sin and is raised again; there is a doctrine of the Spirit (the breath of Aslan); there are experiences of conversion, and lessons in repentance, faith, obedience and sanctification; there is an eschaton, an Armageddon, a heaven and a hell.

All that is lacking is an altar call—but Lewis has already told us he cannot do “the heart stuff.” Yet it seems to me that, in spite of his words, Lewis is not simply baptizing readers’ imaginations, preparing them for a future response. He hopes that people will respond to Jesus, both immediately and in the future.

Why do I say this? There are several occasions in the Chronicles when Lewis comes close to giving away the identity of Aslan. One, for example, is in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Lucy visits house of the magician Koriakin, reads through the book of spells, and comes across a story which takes up three pages and tells “about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill.” She says, “That is the loveliest story I’ve read or ever shall read in my whole life.” Yet as soon as the story is done, she can’t remember it, and she can’t turn the pages back. She asks Aslan, “Will you tell it to me, Aslan?” And he says, “Indeed, yes. I will tell it to you for years and years.”

So we imagine Lucy back in our world, knowing only that she had once read the most wonderful story, wondering how Aslan will keep his promise, and then discovering in the most unlikely place in our world people who treasure a story about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill. And as she learns more about the story, she realises that Aslan is keeping his promise.

Maybe the clearest clue, however, is at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There the children meet Aslan in the form of a lamb, who has prepared breakfast for them on an open fire in a beach. The children are about to return to our world, and Lucy is upset because they will be leaving Aslan behind. Aslan, however, reassures her: “But you shall meet me, dear one”:

“Are—are you there too, sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. That was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me for a little, you may know me better there.”

Lewis’ intention is that readers, having got to know Aslan in Narnia, should try to discover Aslan’s “other name” in our world, and indeed that what they have learned about Aslan will help them in getting to know him in our world. Thus he does not seem surprised when a girl called Hila wrote to him about this question. He comes close to giving the answer, but not quite:

As to Aslan’s other name, well I want you to guess. Has there never been anyone in this world who (1) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas. (2) Said he was the son of the great Emperor. (3) Gave himself up for someone else’s fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people. (4) Came to life again. (5) Is sometimes spoke of as a Lamb . . . Don’t you really know His name in this world. Think it over and let me know your answer!

Like the good teacher he is, Lewis does not spell things out for his students, but points them in the right direction, and lets them discover the truth for themselves. Most evangelists are reluctant to do this! Lewis however is content to sow seeds, nurturing curiosity that he trusts will lead people to consider or reconsider the stories of Jesus without the interference of the watchful dragons. Is this evangelistic? In the sense of calling for an immediate decision to follow Jesus, no. But if evangelism involves all kinds of words whose intention is help people take steps towards faith in Jesus, then the stories of Narnia certainly count.

Does it work?

Some will want to ask, Does it work?—although people like Packer would say that is the wrong question to ask. However, for what it is worth, in the past six months, I have been in email communication with a woman in her 30’s, in England, whom I have never met. She discovered my website, and emailed me with some questions. After some online conversation, I suggested she needed to read the Narnia stories, and sent her the manuscript of my book, The Spirituality of Narnia (Regent College Publishing 2007). With her permission, I’m going to share some of the questions that reading Narnia raised for her:

What have I been created (designed) for? Who am I meant to be? I found the whole creation scene [in The Magician’s Nephew] very moving. It has made me realise that rather than simply (!) being created, I’ve been called to life for a purpose.

I’ve been questioning my work anyway regarding its moral validity [she works in the gambling industry]; reading about how the dwarves loved making the crowns (as you put it, “it is what they were made to do and thus what they do well”) has made me question it in another way – “Where does my passion lie?” “What is it that I have been made to do well?”

How do logic and faith contribute to what I think is the truth? In the “We hear and obey” chapter, the “seeing is believing” / “believing is seeing” section has raised questions about my reliance on my own reason to understand/believe some things, but also helped me understand why and how I know the truth I know about other things.

What are the things that stop me following Aslan even though I believe in him (like Susan in Prince Caspian)? This is one I *really* need to work on.

The way Aslan accepts people and their failings has made me understand much better how God accepts us (and question how I accept myself and others).

In your book, one phrase that really hits home is in the description of Uncle Andrew’s reaction to the creation. “And Aslan will not force him to give in.” It actually makes me feel the “wonder and a certain shrinking” sort of fear when I think about this.

I cannot imagine that (humanly speaking) any amount of preaching would have caused her to ask such questions. But Narnia has reached very deep into her soul, and drew her closer to Aslan almost by the day. The watchful dragons were indeed driven back.

Conclusion

Lewis leaves me with many questions about our evangelistic practices. Many people in our world are guarded by the watchful dragons—they can smell religiosity a mile off and they do not want it–how do we get round the dragons? We know how to appeal to people’s minds and wills in our evangelism, but how do we appeal to people’s imaginations? Are we willing to trust the Holy Spirit enough to ask questions and let people figure out the answers themselves–without our spelling everything out? Do we feel the only way to explain the Gospel is by beginning with sin? Or are we prepared to think there might be other starting points, such as people’s longing for joy, which will lead them to the same conclusion? Are we prepared to make use of a wide range of gifts within the Body of Christ to nurture people’s progress towards Christ, however slow it may seem?

And, most relevantly, are we prepared for the Narnia movies simply to baptize people’s imaginations, rather than producing actual conversions? I would argue that if the movies succeed in disarming the watchful dragons, that is an essential contribution to the process we call evangelism. And unless such sowing and watering takes place, there will never be any reaping.

This article is adapted from its first appearance in the Journal of the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education, Fall 2005.

By way of putting this paper in context, I should say that Lewis has been one of my most formative influences from the time I read Mere Christianity as a teenager. I was on staff with IVCF for 26 years, and the last 10 of those were as a campus evangelist, giving lectures on Christian faith, particularly in relation to culture, on university campuses across Canada. Lewis was one of the models for how to address a secular, or at least non-churched, audience. I have been teaching evangelism at Wycliffe College since 1997, and I suppose being in a more academic environment has encouraged me to think about Lewis and his approach to evangelism, and how it relates to changes in culture, more critically than I had done previously. This paper comes out of that ongoing reflection.

In current writing about evangelism, largely through the influence of Lesslie Newbigin, there has been much discussion of the relation of evangelism to culture, and an assumption–I think a valid and biblical one–that the style of evangelism needs to change according to its cultural context. Peter’s sermon to Jewish pilgrims on the Day of Pentecost is quite different from Paul’s sermon to the philosophers of Athens. The corresponding problem, of course, is that any given culturally shaped form of evangelism cannot be readily transferred to another cultural context, since its message will not be understood or received.

C.S.Lewis was a remarkably effective evangelist to the culture of his day, and Mere Christianity in particular still helps many come to Christian faith. Yet western culture has changed greatly since Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, not least in the ongoing shift from modernism to post-modernism. As a result, some today see Lewis as hopelessly wedded to a modernist culture and therefore unable to communicate to a postmodern world. One author who does so is Rodney Clapp: in his 1996 book A Peculiar People, he points to one aspect of what he considers to be Lewis’ modernism:

The foundationalist C.S.Lewis argued that there is for all persons in all times and places a singular and innate sense of fairness. . . . But today our society is sufficiently pluralistic . . . that different standards are indeed seen to be at work. Thus the prochoicer’s “decent behaviour” is the prolifer’s “murder.”

In other words, Lewis’ kind of argument will not impress a true postmodern. Lewis assumes absolutes and appeals to universals in a way that many in our culture do not. Clapp seems to me correct in some respects. Certainly, Mere Christianity can be interpreted as modernist, in the popular sense that it seeks to argue people into belief in a linear, rationalistic way. For Lewis, Christian faith can only be based on sufficient evidence:

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against. (MC 120-121)

–and his goal is to set out the appropriate evidence in such a way that the conclusion is virtually irresistible. An objective, non-perspectival, faith-free consideration of “the facts” is possible, and faith is a secondary step based on that rational consideration. In a postmodern world, where reason is relativized and distrusted, and where objectivity is considered impossible, this approach is hardly guaranteed to gain one a sympathetic audience. Even worse, of course, underlying all of Lewis’ apologetics is a metanarrative, bete noir of postmodernism. This is perhaps clearest in The Narnia Chronicles, with their retelling of the Christian metanarrative from the creation (The Magician’s Nephew) to the eschaton (The Last Battle), but it is always assumed

So is Lewis’ voice ineffective as an evangelist to a postmodern world? My argument is this. There may indeed be ways in which Lewis addresses his culture more appropriately than he does our own. This is the nature of good evangelism: it is precisely its timeliness that limits its timelessness. Nevertheless, I want to argue that Lewis in fact recognizes and anticipates the dangers of modernity and, in response, demonstrates approaches to evangelism which we might now label as postmodern.

Lesslie Newbigin, in his many books, has encouraged Christians to learn from those who have been involved in cross-cultural mission overseas in order to learn how to address what is increasingly a cross-cultural situation “at home.” Following this lead, I am going to make use of a 1991 missiology classic, Transforming Mission, by South African David Bosch. What Bosch does is to look at the history of Christian mission from New Testament times to the present day, with an eye to the many ways in which mission has adapted to culture. He considers how mission has been influenced by modernity, and how it needs to adapt to a postmodern context, and although his focus is on overseas missions, his analysis this seems particularly apt for our purpose.

Bosch’s first observation about modernity is that:

The human mind was viewed as the point of departure for all knowing. Human reason was . . . independent of the norms of tradition or presupposition. (264)

In these terms, Lewis’ appeal to reason in books like Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, or Miracles might appear to classify him as a modernist. Yet Lewis is actually quite aware of the limitations of human reason and clearly relativizes reason in several ways.

Probably Lewis’ own experience laid the foundation for this. After all, the experience of Joy in his life preceded any rational reflection on the experience. Further, when he describes the foundations of his own personality, he does not see rationality as primary. In a 1954 letter, he explains that:

The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic, than either the religious writer or the critic.” (Letters 444, 1954)

It may be significant in this respect that he saw himself first and foremost as a poet, and that his first published work was poetry.

From this vantage point, Lewis is able to acknowledge that reason is never autonomous but that culture has a role in shaping how we approach truth and reason. As Lewis says of Uncle Andrew’s view of the creation of Narnia, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.” (Nephew 116) Our knowledge of the world is never unbiased, complete or absolute.

This is clear in such places as The Discarded Image, where he acknowledges that no Model of the world can be regarded as ultimate truth:

Part of what we know now is that we cannot, in the old sense, ‘know what the universe is like’ and that no model we build will be, in that sense, ‘like’ it. (218)

He encourages us, therefore, to “regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none.” (222) David Downing actually notes this as anticipating “contemporary post-structuralist historiography.” (Planets 61)

As so often happens, Lewis’ philosophical convictions are played out in his fiction. Thus it is not surprising that in the space trilogy, while reason plays an important part, it is strictly relativized. Reason occupies one seat at the table, but not the seat of honour. Thus in That Hideous Strength, McPhee, the strict rationalist (who, like Kirkpatrick “came near to being a purely logical entity.” Surprised), has an honoured place in the fellowship of St. Anne’s. The Director explains to Jane Studdock, “He is our sceptic; a very important office.” (Trilogy 539). Thus he can ask the difficult questions and challenge sloppy thinking. Yet his strength is also his weakness, and when it comes to confronting Merlin, McPhee is useless: “You can’t go, McPhee,” says the Director; “The others are heavily protected as you are not.” (587)

What then of the reliance on reason in books like Mere Christianity? One possibility is that it is chiefly strategic, based not on autonomous modernist foundationalism, as Clapp seems to believe, but on Christian presuppositions. Lewis’ 1941 letter to the BBC’s Dr. Welch suggests this:

It seems to me that the New Testament . . . always assumes an audience who already believe in the Law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it.” (Green and Hooper 202)

Although he will “mention Christianity only at the end,” that very strategy is a biblical one, reminiscent of Paul’s sermon at Athens. Perhaps this is an example of what James Como has in mind when he says that although Lewis “never deviated from his belief in reason as the organ of truth,” nevertheless he “could adapt with the adroitness of a field commander.” (xxvii)

Bosch deals at some length with the modernist view of science. He observes a new emphasis on objectivity in the modern period, which “separated human beings from their environment” and opened the door for exploitation of the environment and of others. Teleology has disappeared: “science cannot answer the question by whom and for what purpose the universe came into being.” Scientific knowledge is perceived as objective and value-free and all problems are in principle solvable. (264-266)

Lewis’ scorn for what he calls “scientism” is well-known. He distinguishes it from “real science” and “good scientists” since “the sciences are ‘good and innocent in themselves’” (quoting THS).
He is clear what this good science would be:

When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. (Abolition 79)

Scientism on the other hand is by nature reductionist, finally undermining its own credibility by destroying the possibility of rational thought and human nature itself:

Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. (Abolition 68)

The fictional form of scientism is seen in several places. At the creation of Narnia, for example, while most spectators are rapt in awe, Uncle Andrew, the scientist, is already thinking of how to plunder the scientific and economic bounty of this new world. His objectification of Narnia, of course, has the logical result that he cannot hear the music of the Lion or the speech of the animals; nor can he enter into their play. In other words, he becomes less than human.

In Out of the Silent Planet, Weston and Devine, similarly, think of Mars and its inhabitants as objects of scientific and economic interest only. Their bias is revealed early in the book, when Weston complains of the boy they had hoped to take with them, that “in a civilized society [he] would be automatically handed over to a state laboratory for experimental purposes.” (Trilogy 15) When they arrive on Mars, it is not the physical scientists but Ransom, the linguist, who enters into relationship with the inhabitants, shares their sports, hears their poetry, and shares their grief.

In both instances, while scientific “objectivity” towards the environment may bring limited (and usually selfish) benefits, the person who is prepared to set aside such distance and enter in to the environment, reaps far richer rewards. That Hideous Strength illustrates the logical end of this kind of “objectivity.” When Frost is preparing Mark Studdock for the (significantly named) Objective Room, he warns Mark that:

Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical reactions. Social relations are chemical reactions. (Trilogy 614)

The reductionism which is implied in objectivity leads to the mind of dehumanization which is at the heart of the NICE.

Bosch observes that in modernity the doctrine of progress meant that people “were convinced that they had both the ability and the will to remake the world in their own image.” (265) Lewis is not a fan of “progress.” He calls it:

the fatal serialism of the modern imagination—the image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Abolition 80

In Surprised by Joy, however, he admits that he was not always a sceptic about progress. He describes his reaction on hearing that Owen Barfield had become an Anthroposophist: “‘Why, damn it—it’s medieval,’ I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse.” (Surprised 166) Later, he wrote of Barfield in 1936, “The friend to whom I have dedicated the book [The Allegory of Love] has taught me not to patronize the past, and has trained me to see the present as itself a ‘period’.” As a result, Lewis was not a fan of the doctrine “lodged in popular thought that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law’ (De Futilitate 58) nor of its offspring, chronological snobbery, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age.” (Surprised 167)

In The Discarded Image, he further disarmed the myth by suggesting that scientific “evidence” for progress merely followed on a philosophical hankering for progress. This is why, in The World’s Last Night, he says that “Progressive evolution as popularly imagined, is simply a myth, supported by no evidence whatever. . . . No-one looking at world history without some preconception in favour of progress could find in it a steady up gradient.”

Perhaps the most merciless pillorying of the myth of progress, however, comes in Out of the Silent Planet, when Weston tries to defend human colonization of the universe on the grounds that human beings are more “advanced” than other civilizations. Ransom’s childlike translation of Weston’s rant effectively reduces its triumphalism to meaningless folly. Thus Weston’s boasting of “our transportation system which is rapidly annihilating space and time” is reduced to we “can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way.” (Trilogy 120-121) It is significant that both Weston and Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew are punished with cold water on their heads (Trilogy 116, 118, Nephew 123), as if their scientism has been a form of intoxication.

Finally, Bosch characterizes the modernist period as one when people were seen as “emancipated, autonomous individuals”, as compared with “the Middle Ages, [when] community took priority over the individual.” (267)

Lewis has a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards individualism. On the one hand, he fears the crowd, “the growing exaltation of the collective and the growing indifference to persons. . . . the general character of modern life with its huge impersonal organizations.” (“Haldane,” OTOW 108) Yet he acknowledges that this emphasis on the collective ironically stems from an over-emphasis on the individual, “that quite un-christian worship of the individual . . . which is so rampant in modern thought.” (“Membership,” Fernseeds 24)

On the other hand, Lewis is clear about the importance of the Christian community. He is quite explicit: “The Christian is called, not to individualism but to membership in the mystical body.’ (“Membership,” Fernseeds 15) In That Hideous Strength, if the NICE represents the parody of “family” that scientism brings, true community is to be found at St. Anne’s, with its strange mixture of the Cockney cleaning lady, the Scottish sceptic, the academic Dr. Dimble and his wife, the bear Mr. Bultitude, the enigmatic and austere Grace Ironwood, Jane Studdock, the would-be academic with second sight, and the director, the saintly Ransom. The group is bound together by philia, that is, the love which exists between people who “care about the same truth.” (Four Loves 62) St. Anne’s is in fact almost a microcosm of the Body of Christ.

It is true that Lewis’ ecclesiology is notoriously weak. Though he attended his parish church in Headington, he could hardly be called an active participant in the parish’s life. Yet he understands the importance of church as a place of community. Screwtape complains about church because “being a place of unity and not of liking, it brings together people of different classes and psychology . . . in the kind of unity the Enemy desires.” (Screwtape 81) His advice to Wormwood is to distract his patient from these realities by reminding him of the outward eccentricities of church members and the unintelligible liturgies, not to mention the singing of “fifth rate poems set to sixth-rate music.” Screwtape, like Lewis, knows the importance of church, and that, as Lewis says elsewhere, “personal and private life is lower than participation in the Body of Christ.” (“Membership,” Fernseeds 13)
Conclusion: The premodern as key

In light of this, I would suggest that Lewis can be read with profit by both modernist audiences (of whom there are still many) and postmodern audiences (of whom there are a growing number).

How is it possible to do both? On the one hand, he addresses the modern world because he deeply understands that world. He was influenced by it, as all of us are shaped by the culture into which we are born. He uses the tools of that culture, not least the linear rationalism, and the assumption of shared values, to advocate on behalf of Christian faith, to great effect.

But, at the same time, because he is a Christian, that culture does not have the final word, and he can anticipate its demise without concern:

It is not impossible that our own Model will die . . . when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. (222)

In fact, because Lewis’ faith and his academic discipline have their origins before the modern era, his mind is also shaped by influences far broader than that of a single culture: his faith, indeed, his whole mindset, is a pre-modern faith. Some have suggested that the pre-modern has more in common with the postmodern than either does with the modern. This would explain why other sides of Lewis than the purely rational can still communicate powerfully in a postmodern world.

One of the features Bosch observes in a postmodern world is a realization that:

Rationality has to be expanded. . . . This recognition has led to a re-evaluation of the role of metaphor, myth, analogy and the like, and to the rediscovery of the sense of mystery and enchantment. (353)

This would suggest that the future of Lewis as evangelist may lie more in his fiction than in his directly apologetic works, in Narnia and the science fiction trilogy, in The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces, those places where (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) he tells all the truth, but he tells it slant.

Mere Christians: Then and Now
7th Annual C.S.Lewis and the Inklings Conference
LeTourneau University, Texas, April 2004

It has become commonplace in discourse about evangelism to say that evangelism is a process. That is, people come to Christian faith gradually, through a series of influences, and over a period of time which may take months or years. Jesus’ own frequent use of the imagery of sowing and reaping is sufficient testimony to the accuracy and usefulness of the concept of process evangelism.

The idea of process evangelism has, in my estimation, been a useful corrective to the church’s practice of evangelism in several ways. It has forced us to reconsider the adequacy of once-off evangelistic events (also known as “drive-by evangelism”). It has returned the onus for evangelism back where it belongs: on the whole body of Christ, since any Christian can have a part to play in the process, not just the evangelistic preacher. And it has encouraged a fresh appreciation for consecutive evangelistic teaching, of the kind Paul practiced daily for two years in the Hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus: Alpha and its imitators exemplify the benefits of this approach.

If evangelism is a process, however, fresh questions arise. One is this: when may we say that someone has “become a Christian”? When they are baptized? When they pray “the sinner’s prayer”? When they make public profession of faith? Should we even be asking the question at all? When we thought that the move from darkness to light was like flipping a light switch, we knew which was which. If the move to darkness to light is more like a sunrise, however, we may know when it is really dark and when the sun has fully risen, but when we may say sunrise actually happens? And, of course, does it really matter as long as the sun does rise?

The Gospel of John has some helpful and provocative light to shed on this subject, not least in the role John gives to the asking of questions in the process of evangelism. Let me begin, however, somewhere other than John. How does one recognize when someone has become a disciple of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels? For these writers, it is often simply a matter of Jesus saying “Follow me!” and the person responding. This is how the calling of Simon and Andrew, James and John, and Levi is described. The rich ruler is also invited to “follow me” but refuses (Mark 10:21). Peter then points out that he and the others have “followed” Jesus, and they are affirmed for it (10:28). That seems to be the general pattern: a disciple is one who is called to follow and who responds by following.

For the Synoptics, the primary issue in not one of “Do you believe?” although that element is clearly present. (Indeed, following implies faith.) John’s Gospel, on the other hand, does not stress “following” as the key to discipleship with the same regularity as the Synoptics do. In fact, only Philip has the classic Synoptic experience of beginning his discipleship by hearing Jesus say, “Follow me!” and obeying (John 1:43). Even then, we only presume that Philip does so, because John does not explicitly say, “And he got up and followed” as the Synoptics might do.

So how does John understand the beginning of discipleship? John prefers to understand it in terms of belief. An indicator of this is that, while the Synoptics have a total of perhaps thirty references to belief and believing between them, John uses the term almost a hundred times. But what then does John mean by believing? My argument is that when John speaks of someone as “believing” he does not mean a sudden, once and for all, translation from darkness into light, as Paul might characterise it. For John, belief means rather that someone is engaged in a movement away from darkness and towards light. They are in what we might call an evangelistic process. “Believing” for John is simply an indication of direction.

I will attempt to demonstrate that, in John, people often signal their movement towards discipleship by asking a question. More, these are normally questions which express uncertainty, doubt, and tentativeness. In John’s book, such questions mean that people should be considered disciples and not just “seekers” on the way to discipleship. I will offer five case studies to illustrate this contention.

1. The woman at the well, John 4

The woman in John 4 is a classic example of process evangelism in action. Jesus himself reflects that, at Sychar, “one sows and another reaps.” (37) Even within the chapter, a sequence of steps towards faith is visible. It is beautifully summed up by the 4th century commentator, Ephraem the Syrian:
First she caught sight of a thirsty man, then a Jew, then a Rabbi, afterwards a prophet, last of all the Messiah. She tried to get the better of the thirsty man, she showed dislike of the Jew, she heckled the Rabbi, she was swept off her feet by the prophet, and she adored the Christ.

So, at the end of Jesus’ conversation, when he finally reveals himself as the Messiah and the harvest in her soul is presumably ready for reaping, what happens? She says nothing to Jesus, but returns to the city to announce, “Come see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done. He can’t be the Messiah, can he?” (29)

Can such an indecisive question (introduced by meti) be considered a true confession of faith? The rest of the story clarifies John’s intention: “Many Samaritans . . . believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, He told me everything I have ever done” (39). The word testimony is marturion, the same word used earlier of John the Baptist’s witness to Christ (1:7). As in the case of the Baptist, the effect of the woman’s testimony is to point others to Christ. Her faith, it seems, is as real as that of John.

If we have any doubt, it is resolved by the gratuitous detail John provides: the woman leaves her waterpot behind (28), presumably a clue that she has found the living water and no longer needs to carry water. Evidently, in John’s estimation, the woman has come to believe, and her question, though the tentative nature of the wording might imply doubt, is sufficient to indicate that.

2. “Many in the crowd”, John 7:31

A similar construction is found in chapter 7. The context is the controversy Jesus causes at the Feast of Booths. His teaching prompts a number of questions: “Is this not the man they are trying to kill?” (25) “Can it be that the authorities really known that this is the Messiah?” (26) “Where does this man intend to go?” (35) “What does he mean?” (36) “Has not the scripture said . . ?” (42) But the one most relevant for our purposes is in verse 31: “When the Messiah comes, will he do more signs than this man has done?” What makes this question different is that John signals its importance by introducing it with the crucial term “believe”: “Many in the crowd believed in him, and were saying . . .”

Again, this appears to be a tentative question (introduced once again by me). The speakers are still uncertain about Jesus’ identity: they cannot say more than that, on balance, it seems that Jesus is the best contender they have yet seen for the title of Messiah. This hardly seems like a clear-cut declaration or faith, compared particularly with Thomas’ definitive statement of faith: “My Lord and my God.” (20:28) Nevertheless, in John’s understanding of faith this response seems to be quite adequate, since he classifies it as believing.

I want now to return to an earlier example of this same phenomenon. At first sight, it might not strike the casual reader as anything out of the ordinary, but in light of these two clear indications that a tentative question can indicate true faith, I want to argue that it actually has great significance in John’s understanding of faith.

3. The call of the first disciples John 1:35-51

The first contact between Jesus and his inner circle, according to John, comes not with Jesus’ invitation to “follow me,” but with an exchange of questions. Jesus asks Andrew and (presumably) John, “What are you looking for?” They reply, “Where are you staying?” He says, “Come and see.” (1:38-39). The following day, Andrew finds Peter and says, “We have found the Messiah” (1:41). The first thing to note is that, like the woman in chapter 4, after asking his question, Andrew at once bears witness to what he has discovered about Jesus.

The next day, Jesus says to Philip, “Follow me!” (1:43), the classic Synoptic call to discipleship. Philip then finds Nathanael and says, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law . . . wrote”(45). This testimony is directly parallel to that borne the previous day by Andrew (“We have found the Messiah”). The parallel may be represented thus:

Andrew

Philip

“Where are you staying?”

“Follow me.”

Spends the day with Jesus.

[Implied: Philip follows.]

Finds Simon.

Finds Nathanael.

“We have found the Messiah.”

“We have found him of whom Moses . . . wrote.”

Andrew brings Simon.

Philip says “Come and see.” Nathanael does.

Jesus accepts Simon.

Jesus accepts Nathanael.

John thus makes the exchange, “where are you staying/come and see”, and the response of Andrew and John, precisely equivalent to the command to “Follow me!” and Philip’s response, in spite of the fact that the former is far more casual, tentative and informal than the latter. And, in both cases (as with the woman in chapter 4), the genuineness of the discipleship is indicated by the willingness to testify to Jesus’ identity.

The fourth example is one which has puzzled commentators over the years. Does Nicodemus become a disciple, a believer, or not? From the few actual references to Nicodemus, the evidence is ambiguous. In light of this emerging pattern of significant questions, however, I believe the answer is clearer.

4. Nicodemus, chapter 3

Nicodemus is another person who asks questions: “How can a man be born again?” (3:4) and “How can these things be?” (3:9) Commentators often understand these questions as indicating Nicodemus’ lack of faith and understanding, and, indeed, there is no indication in the conversation that Nicodemus makes any move towards discipleship.

Nicodemus hardly appears again (except for 7:51-52—also a question, though not to Jesus) until after the crucifixion, when he collaborates with Joseph of Arimathea in caring for the body of Jesus (19:38-39). In that context, John explains that Joseph “was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one.” Though the same is not said explicitly of Nicodemus, the implication seems to be that he too is a secret disciple. Yet at what point between chapter 3 and chapter 19 did Nicodemus become a believer? If it is true that even tentative questions can indicate a sincere desire to “believe,” maybe Nicodemus’ questions in chapter 3 are actually intended by John to be indicative of a genuine moving towards faith.

5. The man born blind, John 9

Like the woman at the well, the man born blind (chapter 9) illustrates that there are stages of faith, stages in the process of moving from darkness towards the light of Christ. After his sight is restored and the man is first asked about the miracle, he can say no more than that “the man called Jesus” did it (11). Under questioning from the Pharisees, however, he goes further, and suggests that Jesus “is a prophet.” (17) Does this make him a disciple, then? Certainly he asks the Pharisees, “Do you also want to become his disciple?” which might imply, “I am already: what about you?” though it could logically refer to others who are already Jesus’ disciples.

The next step is that the man states: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” (33) This echoes Nicodemus’ statement, “We know that you are a teacher come from God, for no-one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God” (3:2). For Nicodemus and the man born blind, such a statement seems to indicate that they are well on the way to discipleship. (After all, Jesus’ opponents are characterised by their not accepting that what he does is from God.)

In the case of the man born blind, unlike that of Nicodemus, the next step towards faith is recorded. Jesus seeks the man out. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” he asks. The man replies, “Who is he, sir? Tell me, so I may believe in him” (9:35-36). Here once again is the key tentative question, the one which indicates on the one hand how little the person knows, but on the other hand, and more importantly, their desire to believe. The man is perfectly willing to believe, if Jesus will only identify the object of his belief. Jesus identifies himself in similar language to that he uses with the Samaritan woman: “The one speaking with you is he” (37, cf. “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” 4:26), and the man responds more unambiguously than does the woman: “Lord, I believe.” John comments, “And he worshipped him”–the only occasion in John when someone is said to worship Jesus.

The man thus moves in the course of the chapter from referring to Jesus as a man to calling Jesus a prophet, to acknowledging him as Son of Man (whatever he understood by that), to worship. He seems to be moving in the direction of faith from at least the time of the miracle, and merely needs more information for his response to become fuller and more appropriate. There is a sense that the light dawns on him slowly, stage by stage, and that his pursuit of truth is rewarded with more truth.

Conclusion

The theme of light and darkness runs right through John’s Gospel, from chapter 1, where “the light shines in the darkness” (1:5) to Jesus’ final conversation with the disciples “just after daybreak” (21:4). A key to understanding the role of this light is in chapter 3, where John writes:

All who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light . . . But those who do what is true come to the light, that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God. (3:20-21)

Since the Greek verbs are present indicative and thus linear rather than punctiliar, as the English implies, it might be helpful to translate this:

All whose way of life is to do evil habitually hate the light and do not move towards it . . . But those who habitually do what is true move towards the light.

This clarifies the sense of process which underlies the five stories discussed above. Those who respond to the light of Jesus are those who are already turned (or turning) towards the light of God which was present before they ever encountered Jesus, enlightening all people. (1:9) What they see in Jesus is the fullest expression of that light to which they were already responding in some way. Conversely, those who turn away from Jesus (although not the focus of this paper) are those who are bent on avoiding the light in whatever form it shows itself, and who therefore have particular hatred for the fullness of light they see in him. Hence Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees: “I have come into this world . . . that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

What does this feature of John’s Gospel mean for mission and evangelism? It certainly underscores the contemporary insistence that evangelism is a process. In John’s imagery, the process is one in which people move towards light and recognize Jesus as the fullness of God’s light. But I believe John’s use of tentative questions to signal a true disciple pushes us a step further. Recently I spent time with a young man who was asking questions about Christianity. At our first meeting, over coffee, his first question was, “If I become a Christian, will I have to give up my leftwing politics and become a conservative?” It took another six weeks or so before he “opened his life to God” (his words, not mine). Nevertheless, it seems to me in retrospect that that first question, though tentative, was in fact a clear indicator of someone moving towards the light. Should I have thought of him as a disciple from that moment on? It is difficult to say. Unlike Andrew and the woman at the well, he did not immediately go and talk to others about Jesus. Unlike the man born blind, he did not immediately worship Jesus. But then, neither Nicodemus nor the believing crowd did these things either. So had the sun actually risen or was this question just the first rays beginning to show above the horizon? In a sense, it hardly matters. What mattered was the direction in which Justin was moving. My job (before and after his “opening his life to God”) was to point him to the light I had received from Jesus, so that he could pursue it more closely if he chose. And he did.

I find that, if nothing else, this strand of John’s Gospel helps to sensitize me to the slightest movement towards the light of Christ in an unbeliever. Even a tentative question, full of uncertainty and doubt, even scepticism, may indicate a disciple in the making. It seems to me that this is the right posture for those of us who follow a teacher who is himself “gentle and humble in heart.” (Matthew 11:30) After all, he is also the Servant of the Lord, of whom it is said, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.” (Isaiah 43:3) Thanks be to God.

Sources

Beasley-Murray, George R. Word Biblical Commentary: John. Vancouver BC: Word Publishing 1987
Brow, Robert. “Go Make Learners”: A New Model for Discipleship in the Church. Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers 1981.
Lindars, Barnabas. New Century Bible Commentary: The Gospel of John. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1982.
Morris, Leon. The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospel According to John. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1971.
Newbigin, Lesslie The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1982.
Temple, William. Readings in John’s Gospel (First and Second Series). London: Macmillan and Co., 1945.
Anvil: an Anglican Evangelical Journal for Theology and Mission 19:4, 2002.

Notes:

A superficial survey reveals that this is a theme for a wide range of writers including William J. Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1989), Becky Manley Pippert Out of the Saltshaker (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2nd edition, 1999), George G. Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon 1999), Richard V. Peace Conversion in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1999) and John P. Bowen, Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2002).

John also has Jesus say (twice) to Peter at the end of his Gospel, “Follow me” (21:19, 22), but this is obviously a call to continue in discipleship, not to begin it.

E.G. Colossians 1:13. Of course, Paul’s own experience of conversion was just that kind of sudden darkness-to-light experience.

Quoted by Beasley-Murray 66.

Lindars says of the use of meti, “John means it to be an expression of cautious faith.” (193)
“As Barrett points out, [testimony] is the task of a disciple. She joined with John the Baptist as a witness to Jesus before the disciples bore any witness to her people.”

Beasley-Murray 64.

Morris agrees: “The reason for their faith was not a profound one. . . . But throughout this Gospel it is better to believe on the basis of miracles than not to believe at all. So there is no condemnation of this faith as inadequate.” (415) Newbigin, however, is not convinced: “their belief rests on the great number of his miracles and not upon a true understanding of his person and his origin. A true understanding of one of his ‘signs’ would have been enough to lead them to the secret of his person and his origin and so to a true and life-giving faith.” (98) If the bar is set this high, however, who in the Gospels can be counted a believer?

Newbigin draws attention to the fact that the verb “stay” or “remain” (meno) is the same as that which is the theme of chapter 15: “abide in me.” (19-20) This reinforces the suggestion that when Andrew and John “stay” with Jesus for the day, they have become disciples.

Raymond Brown, for example, suggests that, after this conversation, Nicodemus “fades back into the darkness whence he came.” (Quoted by Newbigin.) Newbigin himself is somewhat positive: “’How can this be?’ might be a mere expression of bewilderment, or it might be (and the ensuing discourse suggests this) the serious question of a man who wants to know what has to happen in order to make this new birth possible.” (40)

Lindars remarks that they make “an obvious pair . . . both are public men and both are secret disciples.” (592)

Newbigin calls him someone who is “coming to the light.” (44) Morris’ comments are worth repeating: “We may, I think, fairly infer that he had a love for the truth, but that he was rather a timid soul. In the end he came right out for Jesus, and that at a time when the disciples forsook Him. Which is saying a lot for a timid man.” (210)

Beasley-Murray says: “His eyes were opening wider!” (157) “The man has moved on from his first position. . . . He still has a long way to go, but he is moving towards the light.” Newbigin 122. The woman at the well also realised that Jesus was a prophet before she realised that he was the messiah. (4:19)

Lindars says of Nicodemus’ final appearance in the Gospel that it shows him as “virtually a full believer.” (304)

“[H]e trusts Jesus enough to put his trust where Jesus shall point him. Then Jesus points to Himself.” Temple 160.

The use of the word lord, kurios, is significant, at least for John and his readers. Morris overstates the case when he says that “there is little reason for thinking that ‘Lord’ has less than the maximum content.” (495)

Beasley-Murray also observes this sequence: the blind man “gains his first sight, and then increasing insight as he progresses from referring to ‘the man called Jesus’ . . . to declaring him to be a prophet . . . then one sent by God . . . and finally confessing him as Son of Man and kurios.” (161)

cf. “In your light we see light.” Psalm 36:9

It seems appropriate for Newbigin’s commentary to be called, The Light Has Come.

“Just as plants are light-loving, and instinctively turn towards the light, so believers love and turn towards the light of God. . . . Since Jesus is the light made flesh . . .all light-lovers will love him.” Brow, 78-79.

It would be a subject for further conversation to consider in what sense the woman at the well, say, was already turning towards the light of God. Some would argue that she makes at least one attempt to avoid the light. (verse 4:16-20)

First of all, I should state that my main interest in this subject is the atonement in evangelistic preaching. By that, I mean preaching whose intended audience is those outside the Christian faith; I mean preaching whose primary intention is to teach, intrigue, draw and challenge the hearers to open their minds and hearts to Christ for the first time. Evangelistic preaching in my book does not necessarily mean large crusades: it may be as simple as a priest’ s Sunday homily when she is sensitive to the fact that visitors may be present who have no prior knowledge of the faith.

The cross and atonement in Acts

There is, in fact, a long-standing connection between the atonement and evangelistic preaching, going back to the apostle Paul, who, recalling his first visit to Corinth, reminded his readers that he “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Writing about evangelistic preaching has long taken up this theme. John Stott, for example, wrote back in 1967:

Our evangelistic duty is . . . clear. We are to “preach Christ crucified.” And so vivid is our proclamation to be, that we must portray Christ crucified before people’s eyes, as if placarding him on a public billboard. We are also to make it plain that Christ’s cross is the only ground on which God can accept sinners.

The problem with this close association of evangelistic proclamation and the atonement, however, is that the apostles themselves do not necessarily preach the atonement in their evangelism. Sir William Ramsey, for example, writing in 1896, observed that Paul did not mention the cross in his sermon at Athens in Acts 17, and that he got very little positive response from his hearers. Ramsey concluded that the reason Paul spoke of preaching “Christ and him crucified” at Corinth (in Acts 18) was precisely because after that experience he returned to preaching the cross, which should have been the heart of his message all along. In fact, Ramsey revised this harsh judgment of Paul at Athens some years later (1913), and no commentator since has classed the “cross-less” sermon at Athens as a failure. John Stott has argued that Paul must have preached about the crucifixion at Athens, since “how could he proclaim the resurrection without mentioning the death which preceded it?” But the argument from silence is not very strong, specially in the light of the preaching of the cross earlier in the Book of Acts.

In Peter’s sermons, for example, it is true that the cross is frequently mentioned, but his example is not one that a contemporary preacher could or should emulate. His message on the day of Pentecost is typical:
This man . . . you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death.
The cross is part of Peter’s argument because (a) it demonstrates the worst that human sin can accomplish (b) it is the sin for which his hearers most grievously need forgiveness and (c) amazingly enough, God is willing to forgive even this sin and (d) it prompted that demonstration of divine power called the resurrection. However, the constant emphasis on “you” (“you killed”, “you crucified”, “you had killed”) means that his argument is localized. It is not one that would have any applicability outside Jerusalem, and indeed the emphasis changes as soon as he preaches elsewhere. In spite of the recurrent theme of the cross, then, Peter never says anything like “Christ died for our sins” until much later, when he writes his first epistle.

The fact is that, in spite of Paul’s strong statement in Corinthians, and although the cross is certainly mentioned in the evangelistic preaching in the Book of Acts, there is no real doctrine of the atonement to be found in Acts. Leon Morris, writing about The Cross in the New Testament, agrees. Though he argues plausibly that the death of Christ “underlies everything in Acts”, nevertheless:
Luke does not give us a carefully thought-out system of theology, more particularly with respect to the atonement.

What Peter has done, therefore, is to preach an understanding of the cross which is contextually appropriate. In fact, his language is so culturally relevant that it has a powerful and emotional effect on the hearers: three thousand are converted! The New Testament offers many such interpretations of the cross of Christ, and specifically of the atonement, which are more or less appropriate to different cultural settings.

Different metaphors, common meaning

The Apostle Paul, in particular, seems to be able to move without hesitation from one to another in a passage like 2 Corinthians 5. In verse 14, for example, he employs a metaphor of resurrection:
Christ died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
Christ died and rose again: now, by being identified with him, we die to our old self-centered way of life and are resurrected to new life in his service.

In verse 19, he switches to a different metaphor, this time from the world of relationships.
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting people’s sins against them.
The language of alienation and reconciliation is relational language. God is a lover whose beloved has gone off with someone else, and he is hurt and angry. Paul says that in the death of Jesus, God is seeking to get back together with us, to be reconciled with us.

Then, in verse 21, Paul uses a religious language, the language of sin and righteousness and sacrifice:
For our sake God made him who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God
It may even be that Paul means the word “sin” here to stand for “sin-offering,” as it does in Leviticus 4:24 and 5:12 (LXX), though that would be the only time the New Testament uses the word in that way. Certainly here Paul is emphasizing the death of Christ for our sin, in the way that a sacrifice was offered for the sin of the worshipper, and arguing that, as a result, we are restored to right standing with God.

As Paul moves from one to the other, however, there is a common idea at the heart of each: the idea of exchange. In each of the three cases, Christ gives us something and we give Christ something. What is different each time is what is exchanged. In the first example (14), it is an exchange of life for death: we give Jesus our death, he gives us his resurrection life. In the second (19), the exchange is of reconciliation for enmity (19): we give him our alienation from God, and he gives us his relationship with God. In the third (21), the exchange is of righteousness for sin: we give him our sin, and he gives us his righteousness. Barth echoes this language of exchange and substitution:

It is the Judge who in this passion takes the place of those who ought to be judged, who in this passion allows Himself to be judged in their place. . . . To fulfil this judgement He took the place of all men, He took their place as sinners.

I would suggest that, whatever metaphors we may believe to be culturally appropriate, the common element of exchange and substitution must lie behind them. As John Stott says:

Substitution is not a further theory or image to be set alongside the others, but rather the foundation of them all, without which each lacks cogency.

Thinking like cross-cultural missionaries

Lesslie Newbigin has encouraged western Christians to see their own society as a mission field, as alien from traditional Christian faith as a foreign mission field. In some ways, all of his work is a response to the concern he states in Foolishness to the Greeks:

There is no higher priority . . . than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and this modern Western culture.

One response to this concern is to consider what the church in the west can learn from the experience of overseas missionaries. Part of that experience is the need for translation. Lamin Sanneh, who teaches at the Yale School of Mission, has actually argued that it is of the essence of Christianity to be translatable. Sanneh’s thesis is that “translatability” is characteristic of Christianity in a way that would not be true, for instance, of Islam. Northrop Frye agrees:

Christianity as a religion has been from the beginning dependent on translation . . .. From the first Pentecost . . . the emphasis on translation has been consistent.

This is what is happening in 2 Corinthians 5. It is Paul’s experience as a cross-cultural missionary which enables him to move effortlessly from the language of resurrection to relational language to the language of sacrifice. He is accustomed to translating basic theological concepts into different languages, making use of different metaphors of redemption in his hearers’ worlds.

A more contemporary example of translating the atonement for evangelistic purposes comes from the work of Don Richardson, a Canadian missionary in Irian Jaya in the 1960s. Richardson found that among the Sawi people to whom he and his wife had been sent, “treachery was idealized as a virtue, a goal of life.” Thus when he told them the story of Jesus, they were struck, not with the heroism of Jesus, but with the ingenuity of Judas, betraying his supposed master with a kiss, and with the apparent gullibility of Jesus. Richardson was unable to reverse this understanding until he discovered the ritual of the peace child, by which the Sawi established peace with former enemies. At an elaborate ceremony, the two villages exchanged newborn babies, and the gift of the children was the guarantee of peace between the two communities. As each left its home village, every member of the village laid a hand on the baby in order to indicate their acceptance of the agreement. Then, as long as the peace child lived, peace was assured. After that, the worst that could happen was that the peace child would die, or that someone would kill the peace child.

Having understood this symbol, Richardson was then able to use it as a metaphor for teaching the Gospel. Human beings have been at war with God, he explained, but God has given us his only son as a guarantee of his desire for peace with us–as the ultimate peace child. However, when the child came, our response was to kill him. In spite of this, God brought him back from death, and he can never die again, thus guaranteeing God’s willingness to be at peace with us. But we have (metaphorically speaking) to lay our hand on God’s peace child to indicate our acceptance of the conditions of peace. Now the Sawi understood. Now Judas was understood in the Sawis’ own terms as the villain, because he had betrayed the peace child. Appropriately enough, the first convert was the man whose child had been given to the other tribe.

The parallels with the New Testament story are patently many and fruitful. There is the image of enmity between us and the Creator, which Paul uses some half-dozen times. There is the innocence of the peace child, fully one of the people yet not himself responsible for the warfare. There is certainly the element of substitution and exchange—an innocent life given to atone for the hostility. There is the response of faith, symbolized by the laying on of hands.

From this experience, Richardson developed a theory of “redemptive analogies”, suggesting that in every culture the Holy Spirit is at work, shaping people’s imagination to receive the Gospel. The task of the evangelist is to find those redemptive analogies and to announce to the hearers how the Gospel of Christ fulfils those analogies. In terms of preaching the atonement in contemporary western culture, then, the challenge is to find such redemptive analogies and to use them wisely.

What then are the redemptive analogies which will cause unchurched people of the twenty-first century to say, as did the Sawi of the twentieth century, “I see. So that is what the death of Christ means.”

Let me begin with imagery I suspect has less heuristic value than it did fifty years ago. The most common atonement imagery I heard as a student in an evangelical community thirty years ago was the language of the lawcourt–of judges and laws, of penalties and sentences, of guilt and innocence, of condemnation and acquittal—in a word, forensic imagery. At the time, I found it powerful and moving and convincing, but I doubt that it is equally helpful today. For example, statistics indicate that public confidence in the legal system (as in all institutions) has dropped considerably in recent years. It seems unlikely that an institution which inspires so little confidence will provide a helpful analogy for atonement, among young people or adults, even though it may have done so thirty years ago. The culture has changed.

Where else might we look? Clark Pinnock and Robert Brow, in their 1994 book, Unbounded Love, point us in a different direction. Unfortunately they overstate their case by caricaturing older views such as the forensic:

A big problem in western theology has been its preference for an abstract legal theory of how the cross saves us . . .. The theory sees sin as a violation of justice and the cross as an infinite propitiation and appeasement of God. On this view God easily becomes . . . an implacable judge and avenger.

At the same time, however, they do us a service by exploring a view which I believe is helpful and which they refer to as a relational model:

Suffering love is the way of salvation for sinners. Jesus takes the pain of divine love on himself in solidarity with all of us. . . . God elects to defeat his enemies by turning the other cheek. . . . On the cross God absorbs all the hurt our sins have caused. . . . Not lashing out, not retaliating, not holding out for satisfaction, God simply loves. The pain of the cross is the cost to God of restoring the broken relationship.

A relational model of atonement

If this image sounds abstract and even verging on the sentimental, Kenneth Bailey helps to earth it. During his time living and teaching in the Middle East, Bailey did extensive research into the sociological background of many New Testament stories. What is relevant here is his commentary on the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. He comments on the paradox of this story: if, on the one hand, this story is Jesus’ summary of his message–that God welcomes us back whatever we have done–and if on the other hand the cross is supposed to be central to Christianity–why is there no cross in this story? Bailey comments:

Islam claims that in this story the boy is saved without a saviour. The prodigal returns. The father forgives him. There is no cross, no suffering, no savior. . . .But not so. The cross and incarnation are implicitly yet dramatically present in the story. More than this, the going out of the father and his visible demonstration of suffering are the climax of the parable. . . . The suffering of the cross was not primarily the physical torture but rather the agony of rejected love. In this parable the father endures this agony all through the estrangement. . . . Any man hurt by evil has two alternatives. He can suffer, and through suffering forgive, or he can seek revenge. Revenge avoids suffering.

This is relational language. “The agony of rejected love . . . estrangement . . . suffering.” I believe that Brow and Pinnock are right to this extent, that it is imagery drawn from the world of relationships, not least fractured relationships, rather than from the world of the lawcourt, which will best help to explain the atonement to people in contemporary western culture.

We are going to watch a clip from a wonderful and strange movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape which illustrates atonement through just such a relational metaphor. The story is of a dysfunctional family consisting of a mother, two sons and two daughters. The mother (played by Darlene Cates) has not moved from the couch in front of the TV for years (literally) with the inevitable effects. The younger son, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a mentally challenged 12-year old whose main pleasure in life is climbing the water tower in the little country town where they live, so that the fire department has to come and get him down every time. In the clip we are about to watch, the police department decide that it is time to teach him a lesson. The older brother, whom you will see first, is played by Johnny Depp.

[CLIP]

It would actually be possible to read this story in traditional forensic terms. Arnie breaks the law and suffers the due punishment. His mother, innocent of any offence, chooses voluntarily to endure suffering herself on his behalf, in order that Arnie can be acquitted of the charges against him. The picture could be improved only if she were imprisoned in his cell instead of him.

But there is also a way to read the story relationally. Arnie and his mother love one another. Yet Arnie’s actions have hurt his mother. Like the father in Luke 15, she has a choice. She could say, let him suffer, he has brought it on himself, it will teach him a lesson. He has hurt me—he deserves to be hurt. She could in that way bounce the hurt back onto him. Instead, she is willing to bear the shame and humiliation it costs in order to get him back. The hug with which she greets him seems to be something like the hug the father gave the prodigal son!

Bailey says, “Any man hurt by evil has two alternatives. He can suffer, and through suffering forgive, or he can seek revenge. Revenge avoids suffering.”
If we can speak anthropomorphically, God was faced with a similar choice. We have done wrong—to God, to ourselves and to God’s world. God could have allowed us to feel the full effects of his righteous judgement. Like Arnie, we would have had no grounds for complaint. That would only have been justice.

But, like Bonnie, God decided to take the other alternative: “to suffer, and through suffering forgive”–to allow the hurt to stay with him—not to bounce it back onto us, but to substitute himself for us. And in the cross of Jesus we see the effect that our sin has on God. Why is there no cross in the story of the runaway son? As Bailey hints, there is a cross, but it is not a visible one. The cross is the suffering in the heart of the Father who allows himself to be hurt, even to be killed, rather than visiting that pain on the child whom he loves.

A Catholic friend once said to me, You evangelicals are so obsessed with the cross, you forget that it is only a means to an end—the end of restoring our relationship with God. For years, I decided he was right and felt suitably chastened. But then I realized: no, there is no clear separation between the cross and our relationship with God. The cross is not a door that we walk through and leave behind as we enter the place where God is enthroned. “God was in Christ” reconciling the world to himself at the cross. The cross is the place where God is enthroned. Our God is a crucified God, and we can never progress beyond that.

Does the relational model have the same theological value as the forensic model? I believe it does. Yet any model is no more than a starting point. A maturing Christian will learn more and more about the meaning of the cross, and some of that learning will come through other models, other metaphors– including some which might well have seemed culturally alien when they started their journey!

So the atonement is central to Christian faith. The words “Christ died for our sins” are precious to any believer. We long for the whole world to know it. But to the outside world, that simple sentence, “Christ died for our sins,” is one of the most unintelligible sentences in the world. People may know something of who Jesus was. They certainly know what it is to die: they probably know that Jesus died by crucifixion. Maybe they even have a vague sense that “sin” is something to do with wrongdoing. So what is it that is so difficult about this sentence? What makes it difficult, surprisingly enough, is the little word “for,” the word that connects two historical realities (Christ’s death and our sins) in such a way as to spell atonement. Novelist A.S.Byatt explains why she rejected Christian faith in precisely these terms:

I rejected the atonement on the grounds that I did not need it, or want it, and as far as I could see it had not happened. God had sent his only begotten son into the world to die “for” us but the story did not make it at all clear what “for” meant.

We would say the story does make clear what “for” means. But the story needs to be told in a way that is appropriate for each culture. And to do that, we need all the gifts of the missionary—the flair for translation, the love of different cultures, the ear for metaphor, the eye to spot redemptive analogies, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

With Cornelius in Caesarea, Peter switches to the third person: “They put him to death.” Acts 10:39-40 Paul too focuses on the responsibility of the inhabitants of Jerusalem when he preaches at Antioch: “Even though they found no cause for a sentence of death, they asked Pilate to have him killed.” Acts 13:28-30

John Stott lists some of them: “As for the imagery, “propitiation” introduces us to rituals at a shrine, “redemption” to transactions in a marketplace, “justification” to proceedings in a lawcourt, and “reconciliation” to experiences in a home or family.” John R. W. Stott The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 168.

Ibid., 168. Martin Luther responded to the idea of exchange thus:
“Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him and say:
Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin;
you are my life, I am your death.
You accepted suffering you did not earn,
that I might receive joy I did not deserve.
You became what you were not,
so that I might become what I was not.”
Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, quoted in a slightly different form in Stott 200.

Northrop Frye The Great Code: the Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press, 1982), 3-4. Frye adds, “The Koran . . . is so interwoven with the special characteristics of the Arabic language that in practice Arabic has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone.”

“Redemptive analogies, God’s keys to man’s cultures, are the New Testament-approved approach to cross-cultural evangelism. And only in the New Testament do we find the pattern for discerning and appropriating them, a pattern we must learn to use.” Peace Child 288. Richardson writes more about this in a second book, Eternity in their Hearts (Ventura CA: Regal Books 1982), where he gives numerous examples of such redemptive analogies from around the world.

A survey of teenagers in 1992 asked them, “How much confidence do you have in the people in charge of the lawcourts?” In 1984, 67% had replied “a great deal” or “quite a bit.” In 1992, however, only 59% shared that confidence. The same survey revealed that, in 1985, only 48% of adults trusted the court system, and by 1990 that figure had dropped to 43%. Reginald Bibby and Donald Posterski Teen Trends: A Nation in Motion (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), 174.

By the same token, images of Christian commitment drawn from the marriage relationship are less convincing than they were fifty years ago.

Clark H. Pinnock and Robert C. Brow Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press1994), 100.

Ibid., 103.

N.T.Wright testifies that “the work of Bailey . . . has been eyes to the blind.” He also comments that “Bailey’s work is not well known, and not easily accessible.” Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 129n., 133n.

Reginald Bibby notes that while 83% of Canadians value friendship as very important, success and freedom come in lower, at 76% and 75% respectively and a good education at 63%. As young people look to the future, 82% say a good marriage and family life are very important; 75% affirm strong friendships; while only 16% see social justice as very important and only 6% consider being a leader in the community important. Reginald W. Bibby Mosaic Madness: the Poverty and Potential of Life in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart , 1990), 109, 97.

A.S.Byatt, in The God I Want, ed. James Mitchell (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1967), 73. This is why C. S. Lewis’ faux naivety about the atonement will not do: “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. . . . I will tell you what it is like. All sensible people know that if you are tired and hungry a meal will do you good. But the modern theory of nourishment—all about the vitamins and proteins—is a different thing.” C.S.Lewis Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952; Fontana Books 1955), 54-55. We are not “sensible people” where the cross is concerned, and if we do not know something of “the theory” of the cross, we do not know what God is like.